Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History. By Karl Jacoby. (New York: Penguin, 2008. xxii, 358 pp. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-59420-193-6.)

Abstract

The Camp Grant massacre occurred at dawn on April 30, 1871, when Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and Tohono O'odhams attacked a group of Western Apaches camped in the Aravaipa Canyon near the San Pedro River. The Apaches were there under a truce negotiated with the commander of nearby Camp Grant. The tragedy happened some sixty miles northeast of Tucson. Most of the Apaches were clubbed as they emerged from their huts. Some tried to flee up the steep bluffs of the canyon, but riflemen on top gunned down nearly all of the would-be escapees. As many as 144 Apaches died in the massacre, and twenty-nine children were captured. The way Karl Jacoby organized this book is somewhat unusual. Instead of a single narrative account of the massacre, he first briefly discusses it in the introduction. He then devotes four chapters to the backgrounds of the four groups involved. He first discusses the O'odhams, whose presence in the region was the longest; next he deals with the Spanish and Mexicans before 1848; he then treats the Anglo-Americans after their arrival in the 1820s; and he closes with an examination of the Western Apaches, whose marauding first developed in the Spanish period.