Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History

Jacoby, Karl.  Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History. The Penguin Press, 2008.

At dawn on April 30, 1871, Tohono O’odhams crept into the camp of the Western Apache living in Aravaipa Canyon, and attacked them with clubs while they slept.  As those Apache not immediately slain attempted to escape by scrambling up the canyon walls, Mexican Americans and Anglo-Americans gunned them down.  Most of the one hundred forty-four victims were women, children, or elderly.  Another twenty-nine children became captives, and were adopted by Tohono O’odham families.  This event, called the Camp Grant Massacre by those few who remember it, provides the focus for Karl Jacoby’s ethnohistory of southern Arizona.

Although sporadic Apache raids continued after an 1872 peace agreement, the Camp Grant Massacre was the last great act of Arizona’s endemic violence dating to the years before Spanish arrival.  Its relative obscurity in American culture allows Jacoby to use it as the focus of his history of southern Arizona.  Rather than constructing a traditional narrative, in the first part of Shadows at Dawn Jacoby presents the Arizona history of all four groups of participants in the general order of their arrival on the scene.  The exceptions to this scheme are the Apache, who Jacoby addresses last in each of his major sections in an effort to recover “the perspective of the Western Apache” (pg. 5).  This allows him fully address the culture of each group, their conception of history, and their perception of relations with each other.  The resulting focus on the Tohono O’odham and the Spanish inhabitants of Arizona provides Jacoby the rationale to explore the period before the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, which set the final boundary between the United States and Mexico.

While the exact dates of their arrival in southern Arizona are unknown, the O’odham presence predates the arrival of the other groups participating in the Camp Grant Massacre.  Oral histories and O’odham calendar stick annals document a culture stretching back hundreds of years, including the droughts and floods that destroyed several large agricultural villages around 1400 C.E.  Warfare also appears in these sources, as does the arrival of Spanish trade goods and missionaries.  Jacoby argues that the O’odham reacted cautiously to both, having an on again, off again relationship with the missionaries as their healing techniques waxed and waned.  Despite conflicts created by the demands of missionaries for labor and the appearance that their rituals sometimes appeared to harm O’odham participants, they were driven together by a common enemy – the Apache.

Eventually the O’odham had direct conflicts with the Spanish over the behavior of missionaries and the later Spanish military occupation of Sonora.  Despite these episodes of revolt against Spanish rule, they reached an accommodation allowing a more or less peaceful coexistence by recognizing the suzerainty of the Spanish monarchy.  Due to their generally distributed organization, the O’odham saw the King as an alcalde, or captain, rather than a direct ruler.  This same sense of general loyalty to a leader informed their relationship to the Republic of Mexico during its short-lived control of what became the American Southwest.

The United States initially maintained relations with the O’odham that were functionally the same as those Mexico had cultivated.  American companies brought an economic boom to southern Arizona from their acquisition of the region from Mexico in 1848 through the beginning of the U.S. Civil War in 1861.  That conflict brought only minor disruption, as the O’odham continued to ally with Confederate or Union troops against the Apache, who continued to raid O’odham and Mexican Americans alike.  This cooperation eventually led to the fateful joint operation in Aravaipa Canyon.

The United States initially maintained relations with the O’odham that were functionally the same as those Mexico had cultivated.  American companies brought an economic boom to southern Arizona from their acquisition of the region from Mexico in 1848 through the beginning of the U.S. Civil War in 1861.  That conflict brought only minor disruption, as the O’odham continued to ally with Confederate or Union troops against the Apache, who continued to raid O’odham and Mexican Americans alike.  This cooperation eventually led to the fateful joint operation in Aravaipa Canyon.

Jacoby’s approach to Spanish, Mexican, and American sources and events is similarly longitudinal in method, but with the exception of Mexican folk songs from after the Camp Grant Massacre are traditional in nature.  Tracing the long history of Spanish and Mexican occupation of southern Arizona, Jacoby examines the role of missions and presidios in pacifying the region, the development of alliances with the O’odham against the Apache, and of temporary treaties with local bands of Apache.  He reveals the seeds of the animosity against the Western Apache that led to the Camp Grant Massacre in the endemic fighting that gripped the region for over a century of Spanish rule.  The American presence in southern Arizona after the 1854 Gadsden Purchase not only brought a temporary economic boom, which lasted until the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, but continued Mexican ruling methods.  The use of Mexican American militia to combat Apache raids created an environment in which civilians felt comfortable taking part in paramilitary maneuvers against the Apache.

The latter portions of Shadows at Dawn deal with the trial of the Mexican American and Anglo-American participants in the massacre, and subsequent developments in southern Arizona.  The judge’s jury instructions virtually guaranteed a non-guilty verdict despite negative newspaper coverage of the incident and the unreliability of defense witnesses, but Jacoby’s discussion of the trial is almost an afterthought.  Compared to the first and third parts of the work, this section seems under-developed.  More thorough discussion of the trial, its origins, the rationale behind the jury instructions, and the exclusion of the O’odham from the process would improve the work.

The aftermath of the massacre see the O’odham and southern Arizona’s Mexican American population displaced from their former levels of affluence and political prestige by the arrival of the railroad and large numbers of Anglo-Americans.  The Apache retained their relative economic position because they received supplies and cash from the Federal government after being forced on the reservations, leading O’odham to wonder if they should have followed the example of the Apache in fighting against European encroachment.

After Patricia Nelson Limerick’s extremely brief discussion of the Camp Grant Massacre in her 1988 work The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, serious scholarship about the massacre was limited to Chip Colwell-Chanthaponh’s 2007 work Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History.  Colwell-Chanthponh similarly attempts to incorporate multiple viewpoints, but restricts his efforts to Apache traditions, historical texts, government documents, and oral histories with Anglo-Americans.  While this provides ethnographic depth and nuance to the examination of the Camp Grant Massacre, it is less nuanced than Jacoby’s work.

Despite the paucity of sources for O’odham and Apache history, Shadow’s at Dawn represents a significant corrective to the limited modern scholarship about the Camp Grant Massacre.  Beyond this, he provides a promising methodology for ethnohistorical studies.  His careful use of non-traditional sources such as O’odham calendar sticks, legend, and oral history is innovative, and helps provide a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the environment allowing the Camp Grant Massacre to occur.  Jacoby also produces a significant advancement in out knowledge of the long process of European domination of the American Southwest.