G21 DAY ONE - MEDIA MESSES

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Media Messes Nothing New

by Ron Diener

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Consumers of today's media excesses might believe that such inept reporting was a creation of the '90s. It is, more or less, a creation of the 1890s.

John Racehorse, Sr., was the Bannock chief from Fort Hall, Idaho, who offered to put himself forward as a test case in the U.S. Circuit Court in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Under consideration was a law passed in 1895 that forbade hunting in Wyoming - except with a license. The Indians were covered by the terms of the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 that gave them hunting privileges on unoccupied lands of the U.S. Government.

The Bannock and Shoshone Indians were formerly "cousins," closely related ethnically, both residing at Fort Hall since the Fort Bridger Treaty, but since around 1900 with all the intermarriages no attempt has been made to distinguish which was which, the locals now often calling themselves Sho-Bans.

They hunted freely in the Jackson Hole area for at least a century before the first white settlers arrived (1886). The locals and state officials made a concerted effort to put together hunting laws that would exclude the Indians. Ironic, that a decade after the first settlements they were insisting on exclusive rights to the place.As the Indians made their annual summer hunt south of Jackson Hole in the Hoback Canyon - newspapers published stories of confrontations, atrocities, slaughters of game and people, callous savages and innocent victims.

In the four area papers I counted 205 stories about these incidents. Three of them were true, honest, straightforward reporting with a check and double-check of facts from both sides of the confrontation. The remaining 202 were either totally false stories or so exaggerated or distorted as to render them useless as a historic record.

Three of these stories were reliable historic sources after the fact - all three of them written by the same person, the editor of the Blackfoot (Idaho) newspaper. Perhaps it was reliable because he bothered to get the whole story from both whites and reds (the Bannocks and Shoshones live next to Blackfoot, at the Fort Hall Indian Reservation).

The rest of the stories were so exaggerated, so desperately anti-Indian, so dependent on racist whites, that perhaps thinking people of the time dismissed them out of hand anyhow.My favorite reports are these three:

Over four hundred white settlers were slaughtered by the Indians. That happens to be roughly twice the entire population; there was only one white casuality - a night watch guard who shot himself in the leg.
The Lemhis from the Salmon (Idaho) area were coming to the rescue of their kin, the Bannocks - at least seven hundred of them on horseback and painted for war. The total number of male Lemhis at the time, according to the official census, was three hundred ninety. Three Lemhis were known to be with the Bannocks at the time, relatives of the hunters through marriage.
The Indians were hunting elk and deer in Hoback Canyon and in the Gros Ventre Mountains, killing large numbers of animals, taking only the skins to sell to hide-buyers in Idaho.

The Indians categorically denied this allegation: they were starving and would have used all the elk meat, even "the tough neck meat, which the women turned into delicious pemmican." And this was exactly the practice of white hunters, particularly from the East (New York, New England) and from Across (European big game hunters): one hunting party of three from Europe boasted that they had killed over ninety elk. They were guided by locals from the Jackson area.

The record in this case is that roughly 1.46% of the newspaper stories reflect actual historic events. And 98.54% of the contemporary newspaper stories consisted in falsehoods or deceptive exaggerations to convince people that atrocities committed against the Sho-Bans by the white settlers of Jackson and Wyoming were done in self-defense.

The Racehorse case went to the U.S. Circuit Court in Cheyenne where the judge found in Racehorse's favor. The governor - backed by most whites in Wyoming - appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. They reversed the decision and found in favor of the State of Wyoming. Two weeks later, the same court issued the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that institutionalized apartheid in the United States.

The descendants of Racehorse live on in the Fort Hall area. They are not inclined to trust white folks - or newspapers either, for that matter.

It is part of the tradition of newspapering in America to be unreliable, to exaggerate the truth (if there is even a shred of it there in the first place), to pass off opinion as reportage, and to slander the innocent.

In this modern age, when the newspapers take up Clinton's cry for taking away the Iraqi's weapons of mass destruction, citing the inhumanity of such practice, who is calling attention to the bacteriological warfare of the U.S. Army against the American Indians - intentionally infecting them with smallpox, refusing them vaccination, standing back and watching them die, stacking the corpses in heaps and piles and burning them, some individuals before they had actually expired? Ah, but that was long ago and we don't do that no more, right? Wrong. Year in and year out, the military "solutions" of the United States have repeatedly called upon the innocent to die - and to die horrific deaths.

A division tool.

Ron Diener lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA, and is keenly interested in the history of the West.

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