The Business of Killing Indians by William S. Kiser;

Author:William S. Kiser; [S. Kiser, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2025-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

In the movie Hostiles (2017), Joseph Blocker—a fictional character played by the actor Christian Bale—shouts to a judgmental counterpart, “I’ve killed savages; I’ve killed plenty of ’em, ’cause that’s my fucking job.”1 Hollywood usually misses the mark by a wide margin when it comes to historical accuracy, but in this dialogue the screenwriter got several things right. Hostiles is notable for its revisionist approach to the western film genre, with one critic praising the plot for its “conscientious attempt to reckon with the legacy of plunder and racism that flickers behind the legends.”2 With this purpose in mind, Blocker’s terse but proud comment—or something very close to it—could just as easily have rolled off the tongue of any frontier scalp hunter in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. In a mere thirteen words that include “savages,” “killed,” and “job,” the statement captures the direct connections among racism, murder, and financial gain that undergirded scalp warfare throughout North America. Blocker slew Indians not just because he hated them but also because he got paid to do so, and he showed no remorse for his deeds or empathy for his victims. In fact, at an early juncture in the film, he was ready and eager to kill again as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Here, cinematic imagination blends with historical reality: these traits could describe John Lovewell or John Johnson or John Baylor just as accurately as they characterize the fictitious Joseph Blocker.

Outside of the movie theater, bookworms might think of the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. Published by Random House in 1985, Blood Meridian has been critically acclaimed as one of the greatest western novels ever written, and the plot is loosely based on John Joel Glanton’s scalping gang that slaughtered Apaches in northern Mexico during the mid-nineteenth century.3 In producing his monumental work of fiction, McCarthy received a coveted MacArthur Genius Grant, researched the firsthand accounts of bounty hunters and government officials who paid them, moved his residence to the border town of El Paso, Texas, and even learned to speak Spanish in order to immerse himself within the US-Mexico region in which the tale was set. Although it has never been successfully adapted into a screenplay, Blood Meridian is notable, among other literary qualities, for its grotesque descriptions of extralethal violence and violent display, some of which correlate directly to documented historical events.4 When the plot turns, for instance, to Glanton meeting an old Apache woman on the overland trail and killing her for the bounty money, it revolves around a true story discussed in chapter 3 of this book. “He put the pistol to her head and fired,” McCarthy writes. “A fistsized hole erupted out of the far side of the woman’s head in a great vomit of gore and she pitched over and lay slain in her blood without remedy. . . . Get that receipt for us. He took a skinning knife from his belt and

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