The Ambiguities of Terror

from Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell 

In his book [My Life on the Plains] Custer reproduced a telegram from [General] Sherman to [President] Grant, dated one week after the slaughter, which says in part: "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children. Nothing less will reach the root of the case." If one word of this extraordinary telegram is altered it reads like a message from Eichmann to Hitler.

"The slaughter" to which Connell refers is the 1866 incident in which a band of Oglala Sioux massacred eighty soldiers, under the command of an idiot named Captain William Fetterman, who disobeyed orders, marched his men onto Sioux-controlled land (where he was distinctly told not to go), decided to chase down a few Indians, and was lured into an Oglala trap. My poem about the incident arose from reading the eyewitness accounts of the troopers who were sent to clean up the battlefield. I know I've posted it here before, but I'll give it to you again.

The Fate of Captain Fetterman’s Command

            1866

At first light we saw our enemies

on the bluff

silver flashing in their hair

a glory of sun as they rode away laden

with tunics saddles boots arrows

still piercing the cracked boots

piercing our silent comrades

and just visible in the dawn

we saw wolves and coyotes

skulking along the verge

crows buzzards eagles circling

the sun-spattered meadow

but not one white body was disturbed

for we hear that salt permeates

the whole system of our race

which protects us from the wild

to some degree but it was strange

that nothing had eaten the horses either

except for flies which swarmed in thick

like the stench

all day we waited

till the doctor finished his report then

they told us to pack our friends

into the ammunition wagons

this was our job they said to retch

to stumble into the field to grasp

at wrists at ankles dissolving to pulp

under our grip to vomit to weep

to stare at masks pounded bloody with stones

bloated crawling with flies who were they

this was our job but we could not sort

cavalry from infantry all stripped

naked slashed skulls crushed

with war clubs ears noses legs

hacked off and some had

crosses cut on their breasts

faces to the sky

we walked on their hearts

but did not know it in the high grass

This poem will appear within an essay that is forthcoming in the Sewanee Review, a piece that is ostensibly about William Blake but deals more particularly with the way in which poets risk not only their readership but their own aesthetic values for the sake of an unquenchable, insoluble moral distress.

The Fetterman incident continues to haunt me. It seems emblematic of the way in which the intense personal nature of fear can so easily obscure the far larger horrors of genocide--and yet the individual's fear and terror remain entirely recognizable and compelling. So much slaughter continues to arise from these pockets of horror and desperation.