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for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there’s no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.
    Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look—historical ignorance remains a national characteristic. When it comes to the Old West, subject of thousands of books and almost as many thousands of movies, most Americans now know only the broadest generalizations. They know that the settling of the West involved crossing vast plains and high mountains, sometimes in covered wagons. Most know that there was a gold rush or two; most know, also, that there were Indians there before us, most of whom did not want us taking their land—or land that they considered to be theirs. We, of course, considered that it ought to be ours, so we took it. There were many battles, and the Indians were defeated.
    Now there are excellent histories covering almost every aspect of our successful conquest of the West—a complex often confusing process—but not many Americans read them. Theirknowledge of the winning of the West is mostly arrived at iconographically, from movies, and the movie images possess enormous power. Regarded collectively, movie Westerns have done more to determine our idea of the West than all the books ever written about it, good or bad. If Custer’s Last Stand could only have taken place in Monument Valley, the single most powerful landscape could have framed the single most powerful story; and that, so far as most people were concerned, would be quite enough to know about the Old West, thank you.
    The movies, by their nature, favor only a few stars, and only a few real national heroes. Of the thousands of interesting characters who played a part in winning the West, only a bare handful have any real currency with the American public now. Iconographically, even Lewis and Clark haven’t really survived, though Sacagawea has. With the possible exception of Kit Carson, none of the mountain men mean anything today. Kit Carson’s name vaguely suggests the Old West to many people, but not one in a million of them will have any distinct idea as to what Kit did.
    The roster of still-recognizable Westerners probably boils down to Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, Billy the Kid, and perhaps Wild Bill Hickok. Theodore Roosevelt, a Westerner manqué, would once have made the list, but not today. Custer, Cody, and Billy the Kid are clearly the top three, generating far more imagery than any of the other candidates.
    Skimpy as the image bank is for white Westerners, it is even skimpier for Indians. My guess would be that only Sacagawea, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo still ring any bells with the general public. Crazy Horse, who never allowed his image to be captured, is still important to Indians as a symbol of successful resistance, but less so to whites. Even a chief such as Red Cloud, so renowned in his day that he went to New York and made a speech at Cooper Union, is now only known to historians, history buffs, and a few Nebraskans.

    Reward for Billy the Kid

    Billy the Kid

    Wild Bill Hickok

    Buffalo Bill Cody
    At the broadest level, only the white stars Custer, Cody, and Billy the Kid, and two tough Indians, Sitting Bull and Geronimo, are the people the public thinks about when it thinks about the Old West.

    Sitting Bull

    Geronimo

    Geronimo driving a car in Oklahoma, 1908

The Sacramento River Massacre, Spring 1846

    If my argument in the previous chapter is valid, then it should be no surprise that today the Sacramento River Massacre is, of these six tragic events, much the least known. From what I can find, the first historian to give it more than a paragraph or two is David Roberts, in his excellent study of Kit Carson and John Charles Frémont: the book is called
A Newer World
. Carson was Frémont’s principal guide on the popular explorer’s first three expeditions into the