most formidable military force on the southern plains, driving the Jicarilla Apaches westward to the protection of the Rocky Mountains and subduing Lipan Apaches, Mescalero Apaches, and Navajos. Chiricahuas were pushed west and south, where they roamed Arizona and New Mexico and raided the ranches of Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya. With Comanches joining up with the Utes to conduct raids, the Navajos and Paiutes almost feared their Indian brothers more than their Mexican and white neighbors.31 These were the conditions that continued through the Mexican era and into the modern American period of Southwest history. Expanding trade meant a dynamic Indian slave trade, and this meant additional peons and slaves and involuntary laborers for the economic and social projects of the Southwest.
Before leaving the topic of Indian slavery, mention should be made of the correlations between slavery and sexism and racism. It could be argued that the southwestern traditions of involuntary servitude were accompanied by patriarchy and gender oppression. Certainly Spanish overlords, the gente de razón of Mexican times, and American military elites considered the non-sedentary and semi-sedentary inhabitants of the Southwest (that is, the “wild Indians”) to be racially and culturally inferior to themselves. At the end of the nineteenth century most Americans considered the Indians to be “a vanishing race,” and therefore the conquest of their lands was justified. As an “absent” people their Native bodies were polluted, or as white Californians described them in the 1860s, Native Americans “were the dirtiest lot of human beings on earth … . [they wear] filthy rags, with their persons unwashed, hair uncombed and swarming with vermin.”32
Or as a Proctor & Gamble ad for Ivory Soap
that appeared in 1885 illustrated:
We were once factious, fierce and wild,
In peaceful arts unreconciled
Our blankets smeared with grease and stains
From buffalo meat and settlers veins.
Through summer’s dust and heat content
From moon to moon unwashed we went,
But IVORY SOAP came like a ray
Of light across our darkened way …
And now I take, where’er we go
This cake of IVORY SOAP to show
What civilized my squaw and me
And made us clean and fair to see.33
Because Indian bodies are dirty and impure, they are considered “rapable,” since the rape of polluted bodies does not count. Or, as scholar Andrea Smith goes further to note, “For instance, prostitutes are almost never believed when they say that they have been raped because the dominant society considers the bodies of sex workers undeserving of integrity and violable at all time. Similarly, the history of mutilation of Indian bodies, both living and dead, makes it clear that Indian people are not entitled to bodily integrity.”34
One example can be used to illustrate the aforesaid. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century a small number of trappers known as the La Bonté group were hunting and trapping southwest on the outskirts of the Great Salt Lake. The expedition of five men led by a Colorado trapper named Rube Herring soon left the safety of the lake and headed across the desert. Although Rube supposedly knew the country and was an experienced guide, his ignorance was soon apparent as the group lost their way across the waterless desert of the Great Basin desert. Late one evening several Paiutes crawled into their camp and stole two of their horses. The next day La Bonté and his men followed their tracks to the Indian village. The following morning the trappers, discharging their rifles at close quarters, killed nine Indians and captured three young girls. They also retrieved their stolen horses and acquired two more. After proceeding to scalp the dead bodies, the trappers moved on with their young “squaws” in hand. But they were still lost, and food and water was in short demand.35
Eventually, they were so driven to the point of hunger that one of them suggested that the alternative to starving to death would be to sacrifice one of their party so as to save the lives of the others. The idea was voted down, and La Bonté and the others, who had noticed some deer-tracks, decided to hunt for wild game. At sunset when La Bonté returned to camp he saw one of his companions named Forey broiling some meat on the embers. The young girls were gone, perhaps having escaped. In the distance he saw what he thought was the carcass of a deer. Forey shouted, “there’s the meat, hos—help yourself.” La Bonté drew his knife and approached the carcass, but, as his narrator George Frederick Ruxton notes, to his horror he saw “the yet quivering body of one of the Indian squaws, with a large portion of the flesh butchered from it, and part of which Forey was already greedily devouring.”36
The La Bonté experience is an extreme example and may be a composite of fiction and reality, but it does illustrate the ideas of cannibalism and mutilation of Indian bodies. As for the eating of human flesh, even the great pathfinder and anti-slavery crusader John C. Frémont experienced cannibalism during his attempt to cross the San Juan Mountains in the winter of 1848–1849.37
John C. Frémont, Pathfinder and Not so Free Soiler
On January 21, 1813, John Charles Fremon was born out of wedlock in Savannah, Georgia, the child of Ann Pryor, the daughter of a socially prominent Virginia planter, and Charles Fremon, a French-Canadian refugee from Quebec who taught foreign languages, fencing, and dancing, painted frescoes, and attracted the fancy of Mrs. Pryor. A household slave called Black Hannah aided in raising young John. His father died when John was a youngster of five years of age. A truant in the private schools, he went on to college to study mathematics and the natural sciences. At age 25 he changed his surname to Frémont, adding the accent and the “t.” This was to take his father’s name. His father originally had been called Louis-René Frémont and had changed his name in order to avoid pursuit by British authorities in Canada. Thus John C. Frémont had now reclaimed his father’s true name. Between 1838 and 1841 he served in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, assisting in mapping the country between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.38
Frémont had acquired the nickname “the great pathfinder” because of his explorations in Western America during the 1840s. His career as federal surveyor and “pathfinder” was promoted by his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri, and his travels were popularized by his wife and Benton’s daughter, Jessie, who rewrote his journals into literary masterpieces that made him a national hero. Benton pushed appropriations through Congress that provided the financial backing for his survey expeditions of the Oregon Trail (1842), Oregon Territory (1844), the Great Basin, and the Sierra Nevada in California (1845).39 Most of these missions fulfilled Benton’s “Manifest Destiny” views of America’s expansionist future, and all of them were designed to develop the national economy, from transcontinental railroads to resource development (land and precious minerals). Pushing the American Indian and his or her land to one “side” was truly the “downside” of this nationalistic worldview.
Frémont certainly earned his “pathfinder” label, even if he was often guided by more experienced mountain men like Christopher “Kit” Carson, “Uncle Dick” Wootton of Bent’s Fort fame, or the eccentric “Old Bill” Williams, or a group of Delaware Indians, Sierra Natives, and Oregon Chinooks. To enlist the services of a “Kit” Carson meant Frémont improved his chances of surviving Indian attacks, thirst, hunger, and angry mules. In 1861, during the Civil War, he showed similar wisdom as Commander of the Department of the West when he recognized the military skills of Ulysses S. Grant and assisted the latter in separating the Confederacy from its terrain west of the Mississippi. His early expeditions led to the Anglo-American discovery of Lake Tahoe, proved that the Great Basin had no outlet to the sea,
