The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Years ago I hiked into Aravaipa Canyon with my small daughter. As I sat in the shade of a cottonwood, carving apples for our picnic I watched her play and splash in the stream that trickled past. I closed my eyes and memorized the sublime moment, serenaded by songbirds in the trees and little Sarahβs laughter.
I gave this decades-old expedition no thought until the recent anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre.
In 1921 a mob of racist whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma, believed a big lie, and stormed a thriving Black community, burned 1,200 homes, killed hundreds of Black Americans and evaded justice.
After college I lived a short while in Oklahoma, making graphics for The Daily Oklahoman. I was repelled by the persistent racism and de facto segregation I found there. Generations after the Tulsa Massacre, the racist horror was erased from memory by the white citizenry, much like one might deny an Insurrection.
I fled Oklahoma City to work in Virginia where this Westerner learned many white Americans possess a gift for selective memory. Much to my surprise I learned the Civil War began yesterday, not 1861. Old times there are not forgotten, do not look away, Dixieland. The very mention of Lincoln among some could earn me a Confederate sabers-drawn glare.
A Westerner, I was self-righteous about my superior tolerant views on race, shaped by growing up in integrated housing on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and then in an integrated multicultural Tucson neighborhood.
In Aravaipa Canyon my little girl and I didnβt see many people, only scampering coatimundis and skittish mule deer. As we followed the creek up the lush narrow canyon I did not tell her it was a haunted place.
I should have taught her to memorize the year 1871.
At the time Chiricauhua Apaches had been battling settlers, stage drivers, couriers and ranchers in the territory for decades. Tales of torture and constant carnage fed the spirit of vengeance festering in the saloons of Tucson.
Many whites felt betrayed by the decision of the U.S. Army at Camp Grant to broker peace with the Aravaipa Apache, a different band of Apaches. Under Chief Eskiminzin they were now living in relative peace under the promised protection of the feds, in the idyllic canyon some 70 miles north of the Catalinas where I once watched my daughter skip stones.
Truth didnβt matter. The law didnβt matter. To hell with President Grant.
Tucsonans John Wasson, Charles Etchells, William Oury, Sidney DeLong, James Lee and the Elias brothers took action, leading a mob of Mexican vigilantes and club-wielding Tohono OβOdham on a three-day expedition to Aravaipa Canyon to address the Apache problem with madness.
At sunrise the mob entered the canyon and slaughtered, mutilated and scalped 136 Aravaipa Apache women and children. Only eight were men. The intended victims, the men, were away from their families, hunting.
John Wasson, editor of the Arizona Citizen, had fanned the flames of hatred for the βworthlessβ troops at Camp Grant and called for the end of the βsavageβ Apaches. Our highest peak in the Tucson Mountains is named after after the man, a fitting honor, I assume, for mass murderers.
Sam Hughes was sorry he couldnβt be there with his pals for the slaughter but provided the mob with carbine rifles, water and supplies. Lee and Oury had parks and streets named after them.
What sounds startled the Apache mothers awake that morning? The thumps of bludgeoned skulls? The crack of Sam Hughesβ rifles? The shrieks of the mothers as their babes were torn from them and, according to eyewitnesses, dismembered?
Their village was leveled. Twenty-eight small orphans were taken by the mob as slaves.
President Grant was horrified.
A jury in Tucson was not horrified, judging their fellow Tucsonans to be as free of guilt as the fine white citizens of Tulsa in β21. Weeks later the ringleaders ran for office and won every seat from mayor down. Elias was elected dogcatcher.
Cochise and Geronimo rose up with a vengeance. After years of war the various Apache bands were defeated and relocated to the San Carlos Reservation, where today they are fighting a copper-mining corporation aching to carve the largest mine in America into their sacred land, their Mount Sinai, their Holy Temple Mount, at their revered Oak Flats.
Many of the Apaches resisting this desecration are descendants of the relocated survivors of the massacre.
In the canyon where the Aravaipa and Pinal Apache once lived visitors can listen to the soothing creek and escape the troubles of this world. But one cannot escape history.
Listen with an open heart to the wind rustling the cottonwoods and you can hear the ghosts of 1871 asking only to be remembered.
