The Spillman Creek Massacre: how useful to an historian is Source B?

One of the historian’s tasks is to assess the UTILITY (usefulness) of a source.  It is not quite the same as ‘reliability’.  Assessing a source’s reliability is about deciding whether you believe what it is saying.  ‘Utility’ is more about how helpful you think a Source is to illuminating what was going on at the time. 

A GCSE textbook published in 1998 included the following source:

How useful is this source to an historian of the Homesteaders?

RELIABILITY

Now I think we can be certain that this incident happened, and we can date it accurately to 30 May 1869.  Huson Horn (page 219) does not tell us where he got the story from, but there are sources from the times that give it credence. 

The first is a report in the Leavenworth Times (20 June 1876) which reports the arrival of a Tom Alderdice at Fort Leavenworth:

“Mr Alderdice is here to make his complaints to the military, and see if any assistance can be rendered him in looking for his wife and child. 

The newspaper describes how:

“On arriving at his home he found it deserted, and was almost paralyzed with grief at finding one of his children … dead on the ground with four bullets in his body, and another of his children dead, shot with five arrows.  A third child had five arrow wounds in his body, one entering his back to the depth of five inches….  Mrs Alderdice and her babe, aged eight months, were carried away captive by the Indians. 

And it goes on to describe the murders committed by the Indigenous renegades. 

Twenty years later, Elizabeth Custer, wife of the famous Colonel Custer, in her book Following the Guidon (pages 224-25), described being asked by her husband to comfort a man who had come to Fort Leavenworth.  Although she did not name him, the man was clearly Tom Alderdice:

“The man was as nearly a mad-man as can be.  His eyes wild, frenzied, and sunken with grief, his voice weak with suffering, his tear-stained, haggard face – all told a terrible tale of what he had been and was enduring.  He wildly waved his arms as he paced the floor like some caged thing, and implored General Custer to use his influence to organize an expedition to secure the release of his wife. 

“He turned to me with trembling tones, describing the return to his desolated cabin.  As he came from the field where he was at work, full of pleasure at approaching the rude hut where he had left his little ones playing about the door, he saw no sign of life, no movement of any kind; no little feet ran out to meet him, no piping voice called a welcome to him.  With the darkest forebodings – for those were troublous days to the early settler – he began to run, and, near some logs, he almost fell upon the dead and mutilated body of one child.  Not far off was a little shoe, and some light hair, evidently torn from the downy head of another child, and a few steps from the door the two younger children lay in pools of blood, their little heads scalped, their soft flesh still pierced with arrows. 

“Worse by far was the farther discovery that awaited him.  The silence in the cabin told its awful tale, and he knew, without entering, that the mother of the little ones had met with the horrible fate which every woman in those days considered worse than death. 

Twenty years later still – i.e.  40 years after the event – the story appeared again, in Chapter 2 of a book written by Christian Bernhardt, a Danish immigrant who had emigrated to Junction City in November 1869, and settled in Lincoln in 1875.  He was a blacksmith, but spent his later years “perpetuating the records of Lincoln County”. 

Bernhardt places the event as part of a wider raid that day, involving attacks on and the killing of other local settlers (including her brother, Eli Zeigler), as part of which:

“Mrs Alderdice was taken prisoner and her two children killed and one wounded.  The latters name is Willis Daily.  He was picked up and carried to Mr Mart Hendrickson's house, the next day after the battle, where the arrow that had wounded him was extracted by Mr Washington Smith.  One of Mrs Anderdice's boys that was killed, was a full brother to the wounded Willis Daily, they being sons of Mrs Alderdice by a former husband.  This killing took place some time about six o'clock, on Sunday evening, May 30th, 1869. 

“Mrs Alderdice was taken prisoner and her children killed about a quarter of a mile southeast of where Weichell and Meigerhoff were killed, on the Nick Whalen farm. 

“The Indians then crossed the Saline river and went about due south to Bullfoot creek, where they camped on the Opplinger farm at a stone cave.  Here the Indians took Mrs Alderdice's three months old baby, choked it to death and then hung it in a tree. 

“At one of Mrs Weichell's visits here, she gave another version of the killing of Mrs Alderdice's baby.  She was allowed to have her baby for three days, but it was crying a good deal, which annoyed the savages so much that they then wrung its head off and threw the several parts of the body into the stream.  Either version is hard for us to read about now.  What heart rending agonies for the poor mother, that was so utterly unable to prevent the cruel act. 

“After the copy for this book was ready for the press I visited Mrs Kine at Leaven worth, and was able to obtain from her a very clear statement corroborating the above, except as modified by her story.  She says "Mrs Alderdice and I, and Tom Noon and wife were visiting at Nick Whalen's house on the day the Indians came into the valley.  When we heard the shooting and shouting, at the time Weichell and Meigerhoff were killed, about five p.  m., Whalen left the house and went off to corral his horses and take them to a place of safety; while Noon and wife mounted their horses and fled, leaving Mrs Alderdice and myself and our five little children alone in the house.  We women took our children and ran to hide ourselves.  I reached the brush, but Mrs Alderdice and her four children were overtaken."

Finally, in a well-researched secondary document based on the available sources, Jeff Broome (2001) is prepared (more prepared than I would be) to confirm the outline story:

“Unfortunately, however, this left Susanna [Alderdice] and Mrs [Bridget] Kine alone with their children and without any means of defense.  Safety had vanished by staying in the house.  Believing their only hope for escape was to hide in the thick brush and trees alongside the Saline River, Bridget and Susanna with their children quickly left the Healy house and fled the quarter mile to where the Saline River flowed.  About forty or sixty yards from the river Susanna realized the Indians had discovered her, and in a mournful plea to Mrs Kine, asked for help for her and her children.  Mrs Kine replied that she could not help her and that she must save her own child. 

“At the last possible moment of escape Bridget reached the banks of the Saline, quickly waded through the water and hid herself on the other side in a clump of dogwood, holding her smiling two-month old baby in her arms. 

“Susanna, meantime, unable to reach the banks of the Saline with her children, no doubt carrying her two youngest in her arms, sat down on the ground and in sheer terror awaited the Indians to overtake her.  Upon reaching her, the Indians were absolutely brutal to Susanna and her children.  They shot and killed five year-old John, putting four bullets in his body.  They put five arrows into two year-old Frank, then grabbed him by his heels and bashed his brains out on the ground.  Four year-old Willis was hit with five arrows in his back, shot twice and also speared in the back.  Somehow, amidst her screams the Indians permitted Susanna to keep eight months-old Alice.  While tying her feet to a pony, other Indians stripped the three boys of their clothing and covered them in thick brush. 

CONTEXT

What we do learn from Broome is the wider context of the event?

There is no doubt that, in the mid-1860s, the Indigenous tribes in Kansas had taken advantage of the Civil War to mount attacks on the settlers.  To meet this situation Governor Evans in August 1864 issued a proclamation to Colorado citizens advising them to “hunt down Indians and kill all hostiles”, and the climax to the year's fighting came with the massacre of Cheyenne at Sand Creek in November 1864 – an event which, although it was condemned in the eastern United States, merely convinced the local Junction City Union newspaper that: “a successful war can only be waged against [the Indigenous tribes] by organizing an expedition that will find the rendez-vous of their women and children.  Then they will stand and fight armed men and not before."

In 1865 General Mitchell temporarily drove the Indigenous warriors out of the Kansas frontier area, by burning the prairie grass for over 100 miles. 

In 1866, although General Sherman encountered no evidence of Indigenous troubles other than rumours, and judged that the settlers were exaggerating them “for the sake of the profit resulting from the military occupation” ... nevertheless, the army launched expeditions against the Indigenous tribes, followed by a Treaty which removed all the tribes from Kansas to Oklahoma. 

When a band of dog soldiers led by Cheyenne Chief Tall Bull – which seems to have included some white outlaws – refused to comply, the Army launched further attacks, killing Sioux, Arapahoe and Cheyenne Dog Soldiers at the Battle of Beecher Island (September 1868) and destroying their winter camp (including 400 horses) in November 1868. 

The Army also drafted a number of civilians, familiar with the local country, into a unit of scouts known as ‘the Solomon Avengers’.  Both Susanna’s husband Tom, a former soldier in the Civil War, and her brother Eli Zeigler, were members of this group. 

On 13th and 16th May, further attacks were made on the renegades, killing at least 25 of them, and it was these that provoked the 30th May attack. 

UTILITY

What does all this mean for our assessment of the utility of the textbook source?

Firstly, although the incident and the killings undoubtedly happened, Huson Horn’s account is clearly very dependent on the Leavenworth Times’s account, and I don’t know how prepared I am to trust in the detail an account written by a newspaper journalist three weeks after the event, and sources which were not only written decades after the event, but differ in the facts, and (even to a degree the most modern version) are openly sympathetic to the victims and play the pathos for all it's worth. 

Most of all, however, I would suggest that the textbook source gives a completely wrong impression of Homesteader life.  Reading only the source in the textbook, one would get the impression that Homesteader women faced a daily peril where they might be relaxing by river when suddenly a band of renegades would ppear out of the blue and attack, kidnap and kill them. 

The truth, when the full story is known, is that Susanna Alderdice was the unfortunate victim, abandoned by everybody she might have expected to help her, as she fled from a retaliatory raid by an Indigenous band engaged in an ongoing conflict in which it was the white Americans who were the aggressors.  It was an exception, rather than the rule. 

There is no estimate of the number of Homesteaders killed by Indigenous renegades, but Wikipedia includes a list of multiple-killings.  Some of the numbers of dead are not known, others are wild estimates, and individual murders are not listed but, taken at face value, the numbers seem to indicate that, during the ‘wars’ of the 1860s, some 800 white Americans died from Indigenous attacks, but killed almost three times as many Indigenous men, women and children.  For the quieter 1870s, the figures are 31 white Americans killed, against 642 Indigenous people. 

Even if we more than double the number of white American deaths to account for random individual killings – given that the American West comprises 3¾ million square kilometres – that means that over the two decades 1860-79 there was perhaps 1 death per year for every 20,000 square kilometres of land (roughly the area of Wales). 

Last year, in Wales, there were 24 homicides.  So I think that we can say that death-by-renegade was not a particularly significant problem facing the Homesteaders.