Wednesday 21 November 2012

Happy Thanksgiving.

 
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me.
I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
While all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me.
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,
This land was made for you and me.
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
Ta-ayz-slath, wife of Geronimo, & child

Mangas Coloradas 
 Chiricahua Apache Chief.
"On January 17, 1863, several of West's troopers and a party of miners raised a white flag at Pinos Altos in a symbolic invitation to a council for peace. Mangas responded. He came in good faith, escorted by 12 Chiricahuas, expecting, Sweeney said, "...that the whites would embrace his offers for peace...," especially after "...a war that the Apaches felt had been forced upon them by the whites." As Mangas and his escort arrived, under the white flag of truce, armed soldiers burst from hiding, and "...our squad suddenly leveled our guns upon the [Indians]...," a miner reported later. In an act of treachery, the Americans had taken the old warrior hostage. They released his 12 escorts, sending them back to their people to deliver the news of Mangas' capture.

The troopers took their lone prisoner about 15 miles south to Fort McLane, which had been abandoned and burned in 1861 but pressed back into service for West's campaign. One soldier commented that "Mangas was the most magnificent specimen of savage manhood that I have ever seen." General West, a pygmy by comparison, looked up at his tall prisoner, snidely calling him "an old scoundrel" and saying that he had murdered his "last white victim." In what would prove to be another act of deception, West told Mangas that he and his family would be imprisoned together but would be "well treated."

Meanwhile, West told his sentries, "I want him dead."

West had Mangas thrown into the makeshift adobe cell, where the old chief covered himself with a blanket against the cold and lay down to try to sleep when darkness fell. About midnight, his guards began to torment him, heating their bayonets in a campfire and burning Mangas' feet and legs with the hot metal. They watched him flinch at the searing pain, then they shot the old man to death, answering West's order to kill him. Mangas Coloradas had been "trying to escape," they said, giving West a cover.

"The soldiers who murdered him treacherously buried his body in a shallow grave," Daklugie told Eve Ball. "The next day they dug it up, cut his head off, and boiled it to remove the flesh. Then they sent the skull to the Smithsonian Institution."

In another interview, Daklugie had told Ball that Mangas' "...death was bad, but to the Apaches the troops' cutting his head off and boiling it to get his skull were much worse. That meant that their great chief must go through the Happy Place forever headless."

"The killing of an unarmed man who has gone to an enemy under truce was an incomprehensible act," James Kaywaykla told Eve Ball during an interview for In the Days of Victorio, "but infinitely worse was the mutilation of his body... Little did the White Eyes know how they would pay when they defiled the body of our great chief!"

General Carleton felt proud of the brave guards who shot Mangas Coloradas to death that night. He thought he had broken the back of Chiricahua resistance in southwestern New Mexico. He was wrong. Cochise and other Apache chiefs followed in the footsteps of Mangas Coloradas. The clash of cultures would continue for almost another quarter of a century."

I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
While all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me.


6 comments:

  1. when you think there could have been co-existence.

    Instead, deception and brutality repeated on many continents

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  2. Some day American History will be taught properly... some day. And we will take responsibility for the horrors committed on our own soil... not relish in and celebrate them like we were brave and good.

    So sad. So very sad.

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  3. That's a depressing story, now I look at the lyrics in a whole different way. Apparently this wasn't their land after all. BTW the photo shows Mangas Coloradas' son (also called Mangas). He was also a chief, so the photo caption is correct after all.

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  4. gz: Co-existence is okay.... so long as you're not both wanting sole ownership of the same things. It's sad and nasty, but that's the story of humanity, we've been behaving like that ever since we started to exist.

    Cheryl: I think the Thanksgiving myth is alright, so long as kids know its a fairy-story, and that those indiand who shared the feast were pretty much regarded as sub-human, and treated with suspicion and contempt, as a commodity, like oxen.
    The truly shocking thing about the lies and broken treaties, is that there are still reservations, there are still dual standards, and that which was promised has still never been given.

    Rob in Amersfoort, I'm guessing Amersfoort is, like here, grey and wet and cold today...
    Yes. That's what struck me, Woody Guthrie was seen as a champion of the poor man, the downtrodden and the disposessed. And yet, here in this paean to the free citizens of the united states, here he is, shouting out the lie, once more, that the land belongs to the white man, that somehow it was created not for the people who'd lived there for millennia, but for the good of the descendants of europe's huddled masses.
    You posted a great picture of New Amsterdam, a few days ago.
    http://www.robswebstek.com/2012/11/dutch-american-heritage-day.html
    It made me think of Peter Stuyvesant's purchase and treaty.

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    Replies
    1. Rob: How did you know it was Mangas Coloradas' son? I grabbed the image, I think, from the website I linked. Since I started thinking about Geronimo, I've been reading more of the history of the Indian Wars, because, of course, I grew up watching television westerns, Apaches on the skyline, stagecoaches with their passengers pin-cushioned with arrows, and of course, the Cavalry, in those movies are always the good guys. Now, I'm learning of another side to the story. And you know, my sympathy's tending to be more with the Apaches.

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    2. Grey and wet and cold, that sums it up quite nicely. I think Texas will be nothing alike! I can't help googling for more information when I read something interesting. When I was young I watched Little Big Man (1970) with Dustin Hoffman, in which the US Cavalry soldiers are depicted as villains...

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