On Sunday, May 1, 2011, in a dramatic late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, President Barak Obama informed the American people and the world that Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born founder of Al Qaeda, had been killed in a firefight with United States Special Forces. The announcement came nearly a decade after the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent and often frustrating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in framing the moment, President Obama evoked the enduring notion of American innocence in its wars of aggression. “The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and it started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens,” he said. “Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved one to al Qaeda's terror: Justice has been done.”Footnote ² And that evening, in the midnight darkness of a moonless night, crowds gathered outside the White House, in Time Square, at Ground Zero, and on street corners and in pubs across the country, and they celebrated. They waved flags. They lit candles. They sang “The Star Spangled Banner.” And they chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A!”Footnote ³

With its celebratory assertion of justice making, discourses of American innocence permeated news of the death of Osama bin Laden. But as details of the daring raid began to emerge, notions of redemptive violence toward foreign terrorists began to mingle in uncomfortable ways with the legacy of U.S.-Indigenous violence in America. Americans soon learned that the twenty-three Navy SEALs, their interpreter, and their Belgian Malinois named Cairo had traveled from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to Abbottabad, Pakistan, in two modified MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, named after the famous Sauk warrior. They also learned that three school bus-sized Chinook heavy-lift helicopters supported the operation. But perhaps most tellingly, Americans learned that the code name used for Osama bin Laden himself was “Geronimo,” after the Bedonkohe Apache leader who confounded American military capture for decades in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico. “For God and Country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo,” reported the SEAL team leader moments after bin Laden had been shot, “Geronimo E.K.I.A.”—enemy killed in action.Footnote ⁴

“I was celebrating that we had gotten this guy and feeling so much a part of America,” Tom Holm, a citizen of the Plains Cherokee Nations and a retired professor of American Indian studies at the University of Arizona, told the Washington Post. “And then this ‘Geronimo EKIA’ thing comes up. I just said, ‘Why pick on us?’ Robert E. Lee killed more Americans than Geronimo ever did, and Hitler would seem to be evil personified, but the code name for bin Laden is Geronimo?”Footnote ⁵ Holm's disappointment was not unique. Indeed, the reaction from the Native American community was unequivocal. “To equate Geronimo with Osama bin Laden is an unpardonable slander of Native America and its most famous leader in history,” said Harlyn Geronimo, the legendary Apache leader's great-grandson. Others, like Fort Sill Apache Tribal Chairman Jeff Houser, decried the implicit connection between “the greatest symbol of Native American resistance in the History of the United States” and a “mass murderer and cowardly terrorist.”Footnote ⁶

The killing of Osama bin Laden and the code name controversy that followed may seem like an odd place to begin an essay about the legacy of U.S.-Indigenous violence in the Gilded Age. But it is precisely these avenues of continuity I wish to highlight here. Indeed, while there are many lessons one might take from this use of Geronimo's name, perhaps the most straightforward conclusion is that the Indian wars clearly still matter. Few subjects have occupied a more central role in American historical imagination and consciousness as nineteenth-century U.S.-Indigenous violence. From Wild West shows and pulp novels to Hollywood films, television shows, and amusement parks, their perceived romance and tragedy have contributed to Americans' evolving relationship to the past and continuing sense of identity. But the enduring legacy of the Indian wars and their memory, I argue here, runs much deeper. As activist and author Winona LaDuke pointed out on Democracy Now! shortly after bin Laden's death: “The military is full of native nomenclature … You've got Black Hawk helicopters, Apache Longbow helicopters. You've got Tomahawk missiles. The term used when you leave a military base in a foreign country is to go ‘off the reservation, into Indian Country.' So what is that messaging that is passed on? You know, it is basically the continuation of the wars against indigenous people … that is the reality of military nomenclature and how the military basically uses native people and native imagery to continue its global war and its global empire practices.”Footnote ⁷

In this brief article, I want to explore with a bit more historical insight the notion that there exist cultural continuities between episodes of U.S.-Indigenous violence in the Gilded Age and U.S. global imperial culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The common theme of this enduring legacy is the persistent production and reproduction of American innocence as well as the reliance on redemptive violence in the face of perceived injustices. Given the space provided here, this must be a cursory examination. And so, to tell this story of the making of American innocence in the Gilded Age, I would like to consider historical memories of the Modoc War of 1872–73—California's so-called last Indian War, an event that may seem far removed from the Global War on Terror but whose enduring legacy lives on in our collective historical memory as well as the very legal foundations for the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Today, most Americans know little or nothing of the Modoc War.Footnote ⁸ Yet, in 1888, historian Hubert Howe Bancroft called it “the most remarkable [war] that ever occurred in the history of aboriginal extermination.”Footnote ⁹ More than two decades later, on the eve of the First World War, anthropologist Jeremiah Curtin signaled the war's prominence in American historical memory when he wrote, “The majority of Americans know who the Modocs are and where they live, for on a time their bravery and so-called treachery gave them widespread notoriety.”Footnote ¹⁰ But although the Modoc War has been overshadowed in the nation's historical memory by events such as the Sand Creek Massacre, the Battle of Greasy Grass, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee, it was nonetheless an exceptional example of Indigenous resistance to nineteenth-century American expansion.Footnote ¹¹ In remembering the Modoc War throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, however, Americans have created an enduring script to justify their use of redemptive violence. And in doing so, the Indians wars of the postbellum period have become the prism through which Americans understand their wars of aggression as defensive and their empire as fundamentally innocent.

Of course scholars have not ignored the history of settler-Indian violence. Indeed, in recent years they have sought to connect nineteenth-century U.S.-Indigenous violence with the larger social, economic, and political themes of Gilded Age historiography. In investigating the ecological history of expanding industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century, for example, historians of the American West such as Richard White, Andrew Isenberg, and others have deepened our understanding of the relationship between U.S.-Indian violence and chaotic capitalism in the Gilded Age.Footnote ¹² The inherently political nature of settler-Indian violence has also received considerable scholarly attention, and in doing so, historians such as Heather Cox Richardson and Karl Jacoby have demonstrated the importance of these violent episodes to the heady politics of the era.Footnote ¹³ Recent examinations of racial discourse and representations of Indigenous people in the Gilded Age media, such as Linda Frost's Never One Nation (2005), as well as new studies of the era's assimilation debates and contestations between reformers and government officials, such as C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa's Crooked Paths to Allotment (2012), have similarly suggested the importance of understanding U.S.-Indigenous violence within larger debates over the place of racial minorities within the United States after the Civil War.Footnote ¹⁴ Within recent historiography, then, the Indian wars of the Gilded Age reflect the era's focus on economic, social, and political themes.

But once defeated in battle, stripped of their land by force or treaty, Indigenous peoples recede from stories of the masculine partisanship of the Gilded Age or the reform movements of the Progressive Era. The Indian wars become a tragic moment in American history, a concluding chapter disconnected in many ways from the political-social narrative at the heart of much Gilded Age literature and the central racial drama of Reconstruction and the postbellum South.

After the violent reordering of the West, however, traditions of remembering the Indian wars of the Gilded Age shaped American conceptions of their own identity. And in remembering the Indian wars, Americans created and performed memorial traditions through which they would come to understand their nation's role in the world as an imperial power. Scholars often locate the birth of American imperialism in the turn toward wars of expansion and influence in Latin American and the Pacific in the 1890s and beyond.Footnote ¹⁵ But when we look at the memorial practices of remembering settler-Indian violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find Americans learning how to be an empire of innocence by telling stories of white victimhood and redemptive violence in the aftermath of the Indian wars.

While some critics have at times questioned the applicability and reach of memory studies, it is undeniable that sustained attention to the American fascination with things historical has deepened our understanding of the production of history and the presence of the past at various points in time.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, post-Civil War commemorations combined with processes of urbanization and industrialization to fuel Americans' expanding desires for the historical and memorial. From popular art and public commemorations to the proliferation of published works of reminiscence, antiquarianism, and regional and ethnic historical societies, Americans compulsively evoked the past in a self-conscious effort to invent tradition. As historian Michael Kammen has observed, “Anyone who probes historical sources [from] this period will be figuratively assaulted by the nation's arsenal of memory devices and by the astonishing diversity of its stockpile.”Footnote ¹⁷

The Indian wars provided a fruitful ground for this invention of tradition. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Americans embraced their history of settler-Indian violence and in the process inscribed it with their contemporary political, social, cultural, and economic anxieties.Footnote ¹⁸ And in the context of the Indians wars, settler colonial and nationalistic histories told stories of Indigenous criminality and white victimhood. They also emphasized the fundamental innocence of the American character and contributed, ultimately, to the self-image of the United States as neither expansionist nor a colonial power. In the aftermath of nineteenth-century U.S.-Indigenous violence, in other words, Americans have littered their history with claims to innocence.Footnote ¹⁹

The retreat to innocence in the face of Indigenous resistance has deep roots in North American history. The Puritans, for example, believed that they were establishing a City on the Hill, a beacon to the world of a divinely inspired and innocent new beginning. The horrendous violence, genocide, and ethnic cleansing they unleashed on colonial North America was justified, they said, because it was necessary to preserve the fundamental innocence of their endeavor.Footnote ²⁰

The Puritans may have originated the myth of American innocence, but nineteenth-century Americans perfected it. Many Americans claimed a ‘manifest destiny' to justify their territorial expansion westward. They argued that republican ideas of political freedom stemmed from economic freedoms and the freedom of mobility. At their most sublime, these arguments worked together, allowing nineteenth-century Americans to develop and to adopt a theory of the United States as an empire of innocence. And conveniently, they also helped Americans rationalize a version of their history in which the territorial expansion of the nation was necessary for the success of their republican experiment. American freedom, they insisted, required a culture of broad-based white, male landownership. Any violence that might result from this expansion was surely justified as innocent, for theirs was, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, an “empire of liberty.”Footnote ²¹ And if American freedom relied upon the expansion of a virtuous yeomanry, any obstacle to that movement or any attack on that citizenry constituted a threat to the nation itself. Americans, then, were the victims of frontier violence and Indians the irrational aggressors and violators of a civilized nation's just laws. At least, that is what Americans told themselves.Footnote ²²

Which brings us back to the Modoc War, a five-month long peace-negotiation-turned-campaign of extermination that forever changed the world of the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin peoples. The conflict began on November 29, 1872, when soldiers of the U.S. Army tried to arrest the Modoc headman Captain Jack and his followers and return them to the Klamath Reservation in southern Oregon.Footnote ²³ The Modocs had signed the treaty of 1864, which reserved over one million acres of land from their original claim of more than twenty million acres in the Klamath Basin. For the exchange, they were to receive thousands of dollars in supplies and the government's protection from invading settlers. But when the deal fell through and promised supplies failed to materialize, Captain Jack and some three hundred other Klamath Basin Indians left the reservation and rejected the treaty.Footnote ²⁴ In the fall of 1872, the federal government sent soldiers to arrest the Modocs in their villages on the banks of the Lost River. The Modocs resisted. And in the ensuing Battle of Lost River, several soldiers died as well as fourteen Euro-American settlers in the surrounding countryside. The Modocs escaped with only a handful of casualties, and took shelter in a series of highly defensible caves along the south shore of Tule Lake.Footnote ²⁵

The conflict that followed pitted nearly 1000 soldiers of the U.S. Army, and between 70 and 150 Native allies, against approximately 53 Modoc warriors and their families.Footnote ²⁶ Unlike many episodes of nineteenth-century U.S.–Indian violence, the Modoc War was characterized by long periods of protracted negotiations and intense newspaper coverage with only periodic, if nonetheless profound, incidents of violence. At issue were the Modocs' desire to remain in their homeland and their refusal to return to the Klamath Reservation. Euro-American settlers and their state and federal governments, however, maintained that the Modocs had violated the treaty, which, they insisted, had extinguished the tribe's right to the land. Moreover, a grand jury in Jacksonville, Oregon, had indicted several Modocs for “murdering” the 14 settlers during the U.S. Army's attempted arrest. Following another defeat of the military by the Modocs in January, a peace commission was established to negotiate a settlement. For a little over two months, the commissioner and their military advisors met with Captain Jack to discuss terms for their surrender.Footnote ²⁷

The Modoc War became a national and international sensation when the Modocs attacked the peace commission during negotiations on April 11, 1873, killing two of its members: Major General Edward R. S. Canby, Commander of the Department of the Columbia, and the Reverend Eleazer Thomas; and wounding a third, Alfred B. Meacham. The press declared the Modocs to be “murders” for their “base treachery” while the Commanding General of the U.S. Army, William Tecumseh Sherman, called for the Modocs’ “utter extermination.”Footnote ²⁸ On April 15, the Army attacked the Modocs, forcing them from the shores of Tule Lake. The Modoc War ended six weeks later when Captain Jack and a handful of followers finally surrendered on the banks of Willow Creek east of Tule Lake.

The trial of Captain Jack and five other Modocs for the attack on the peace commission was a brief affair. In a federal Attorney General's opinion, George H. Williams argued the Modocs should be tried by military commission rather than by the civil authorities. Military commissions were relatively new. First introduced during the Mexican War, they became common practice during the Civil War when military commissions conducted some 4,271 trials. And the practice continued through Reconstruction when military commissions were used throughout the South as convenient avenues for the federal government to enforce many of the provisions of the Reconstruction Acts.Footnote ²⁹ But military commissions had also been used in the West to deal with Indians, most notably in 1862 when the U.S. Army tried 392 Dakota men in Minnesota for rape, murder, robbery, and other crimes allegedly committed during the U.S.-Dakota War.Footnote ³⁰ In the case of the Modocs, Williams argued, a military commission should hear the case because, according to his understanding of the law, their status as “domestic dependent nations” rendered them equivalent to foreign nations. Moreover, their crimes, he insisted, were in violation of the laws of war. Finally, although combat had ostensibly ended, no enduring “agreement for peace” had been established at the time of the trial, giving military authorities jurisdiction.Footnote ³¹ Popular opinion agreed. And as a result of Williams's rather selective interpretation of the law, a military commission charged the Modocs with murder and attempted murder in violation of the laws of war. Without the aid of legal counsel—a violation of military code—they appeared before a commission composed of soldiers who had served under Canby and who had fought in the Modoc War. No extenuating circumstances were introduced. And Captain Jack and the others were found guilty on all counts. Later that year they were executed.Footnote ³²

Steeped in claims to American innocence at the time, Americans have reinforced this narrative through their remembrances of the conflict. Consider, for instance, the physical memorials to the war's so-called victims. Following the death of Canby and Thomas, soldiers of the U.S. Army placed a temporary cross made out of wood from the commissioner's tent and held in place, according to at least one account, by a base of local lava rocks covered in the general's own blood.Footnote ³³ This memorial was featured in Harper's Weekly with the caption “Scene of Canby's Death” (Figure 1). But it was an impermanent marker. By June 1880, all that remained of the original monument was a single board sticking out of the ground with the words “This marks the spot where the Peace Tent stood April 11, 1873” written upon it.Footnote ³⁴

Figure 1.

“Scene of Canby's Death.” Wood Engraving. Harper's Weekly, June 14, 1873 (500).

Two years later, Lieutenant John S. Parke visited the Lava Beds. Parke, who had been stationed at nearby Fort Klamath after graduating from West Point, had set out to discover “the exact locality” where General Canby had died. His goal was to create a memorial such that “when this historic place comes to be visited by the interested or the curious, it may not be of such uncertain location as to be a matter of speculation and discussion.” Parke enlisted the help of a local carpenter, and together they erected a memorial cross “of lumber about six inches square, twelve feet high with arms of four feet.” On the horizontal piece, Parke inscribed: “gen. canby usa was murdered here by the modocs april 11 1873.”Footnote ³⁵

This is Canby's Cross. And it remains one of the most enduring features of the Modoc War's commemorative landscape. Combining Christian iconography and colonial jurisprudence, the memorial marks the region with a narrative of American innocence. Indeed, by using the word “murdered,” it portrayed Indigenous resistance to American settler colonialism as criminal, suggesting their acts of violence were unprovoked homicide. As a human-sized cross, it draws direct connections between Canby and Christ, who it is said was betrayed by his followers; as the San Francisco Chronicle observed at the time, Canby was “betrayed” by a band of “Red Judas.”Footnote ³⁶ Canby's Cross, in other words, is an enduring monument to American innocence and the cult of white victimhood (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Canby's Cross today. Photo by the author.

Monuments and memorials to American innocence through redemptive violence were popular throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, in addition to Canby's Cross, numerous other monuments and memorials were erected in the 1870s and 1880s. These markers reinforced ideas of Indigenous criminality by portraying American colonists and Western army officials as the innocent victims of Indian violence. Between 1861 and 1879, New England residents dedicated at least three separate monuments to Hannah Duston, a colonial New England woman who was captured by Abenaki Indians during a 1697 raid. But the Duston captivity story advanced a particular narrative of American innocence through redemptive violence. Once taken captive, the Abenaki killed Duston's six-day-old child, Martha. In revenge, Duston killed and scalped ten of her twelve captors, including six children. More than a century-and-half later, New Englanders found this story worth commemorating. According to historian Barbara Cutter, memorials to Duston proliferated during the Gilded Age because her story allowed Americans to understand U.S.-Indian violence as defensive and virtuous, feminine violence. After all, Duston was a mother whose baby had been “murdered” before her eyes. The “natural” impulse for revenge was “a perfect symbol for the virtuous violence of the outraged innocent.”Footnote ³⁷

But stories of redemptive violence and outraged innocence were not limited to American women in the Gilded Age. Indeed, since the nineteenth century, there has been no more celebrated victim of Indian violence than Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Following his death on June 25, 1876, at the Battle of Greasy Grass Creek, Americans transformed Custer, a disgraced Civil War cavalry officer, into the heroic and sacrificial victim of an Indian massacre. In 1879, Secretary of War George Washington McCary preserved the site as a U.S. national cemetery. Later that year, Captain George Sanderson, stationed at Fort Custer, placed a cordwood monument atop a grassy knoll, which many were beginning to call “Last Stand Hill.” Two years later, an eighteen-ton granite obelisk replaced Sanderson's monument.Footnote ³⁸ In the Progressive Era and beyond, sites of national mourning such as Last Stand Hill and cenotaphs for “innocent” victims of Indigenous violence such as Canby's Cross soon became popular tourist attractions.

The seeds of this culture of American innocence through commemoration, however, were sown long before. Indeed, newspaper coverage and political cartoons of the day often portrayed Indian violence as illegal, illegitimate, and a fundamental threat to the moral character of the nation. This often took the form of a highly racialized discourse that presented Natives as “insolent” and the Army's actions as disciplinary in nature. But the delegitimization of Indigenous resistance as childish cheekiness also had a darker side as it found fully expression in the era's extermination discourse. Consider a political cartoon published by Harper's Weekly at the height of the Modoc War. Captioned “Uncle Sam Hunting for the Modoc Flea in His Lava Bed” (Figure 3), it depicted a Modoc with the body of a flea.Footnote ³⁹ At this very moment, the U.S. Army was pursuing the Modocs and Sherman was declaring, “Now let extermination be the word. Let no Modoc live to boast that his ancestor had aught to do with the death of Gen. Canby.” These images made explicit the connections among discourse, violence, and American innocence in the newspaper coverage of the Modoc War.Footnote ⁴⁰

Figure 3.

“Uncle Sam Hunting for the Modoc Flea in His Lava Bed.” Wood engraving. From Harper's Weekly, May 10, 1873.

But perhaps the most enduring legacy of settler-Indian violence within American historical memory can be observed in the American consumer culture of the Indian wars. Through the depiction of Indians in the Gilded Age popular press or on the lyceum lecture stage, newspapermen as well as performers such as P. T. Barnum and his famous traveling museum of so-called freaks and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody's Wild West Show blended history with discourses of American innocence and Indian savagery to convince white Americans that they were the victims of the Indian wars and not in fact the victorious aggressors.Footnote ⁴¹ Books, photographs, paintings, films, reenactments, and commemorations likewise reduced the complex and political nature of the Indian wars to consumable objects. Through the consumption of history, Americans have made and remade their self-identity as fundamentally innocent.

And these memorial traditions, once in place, have endured. Developed in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to justify and enable the conquest of Indigenous peoples and the colonization of the American West, the cult of victimhood and its stories of redemptive violence soon became an enduring script in American history, not limited to the Indian wars. Indeed, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, narratives of American innocence proved to be highly communicable concepts. From the explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor (1898) and the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat (1915), to the Balangiga Massacre in the Philippines (1901), the bombing of the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor (1941), the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam (1964), and the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, allegedly unprovoked assaults on supposedly innocent American citizens or service personnel have been used to justify belligerent policies and wars of aggression throughout the long twentieth century. The perseverance of these historic and nationalistic narratives can be observed in the tendency among Americans to view their wars as defensive conflicts. But the connection, sometimes, runs deeper still.

Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration began constructing its legal response to the perceived terrorist threat. Through a series of legal opiniond issued by the justice department, the administration argued for the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. And in one particular memo from March 2003, John C. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, presented a legal argument with a sweeping historical claim. Relying heavily upon the 1873 attorney's general opinion from the trial of the Modoc headmen for the “murder, in violation of the laws of war,” of General Canby, Yoo argued that “The strictures that bind the Executive in its role as a magistrate enforcing the civil laws have no place in constraining the President in waging war.”Footnote ⁴² Enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding could be used on so-called unlawful enemy combatants because federal criminal laws prohibiting assault and battery simply did not apply. Indeed, as William argued in 1873, “It cannot be pretended that a United States soldier is guilty of murder if he kills a public enemy in battle, which would be the case if the municipal law was in force.” When fighting Indians in the Gilded Age as when fighting jihadists in the Global War on Terror, “All the laws and customs of civilized warfare may not be applicable…”Footnote ⁴³

From Geronimo to Captain Jack and beyond, the enduring legacy of the Indian wars of the Gilded Age runs deep in American history. And a central theme of that inheritance is the persistent notion of American innocence. Portraying themselves as the innocent victims of Indigenous criminality and their violence as redemptive and fundamentally innocent, Americans in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era laid the foundation for future historical interpretation, inscribing narratives of victimhood and innocence onto traumatic events and then reducing complex historical narratives to simplistic, moralistic stories of criminality and legality, ultimately enabling naïve political responses from the American public, and perhaps more importantly, from the federal government and U.S. military. Situating contemporary historical references to nineteenth-century U.S.-Indigenous violence such as the use of Geronimo as a code name for Osama bin Laden within longer-held traditions of claiming American innocence pushes us all to reckon with the continuing importance of redemptive violence to American's cultural and historical understandings of their wars of aggression. In other words, the Indian wars still matter, try as we might to forget them.