Horse Slaughter Camp
When we were boys we liked to ride our bicycles along the old river road
out past city limits and across the valley where, near the state line, we
rested along the riverbank.
Our turnaround point was a monument placed by “the county pioneer
society and loyal citizens of the state.” The granite pillar told a story, a
story we learned by heart and pondered as we probed the tall grass
and dirt mounds in search of old bones.
In September of 1858, following the Battle of Four Lakes, Colonel George
Wright marched across the Spokane Plains burning Indian storehouses
and lodges.
On the eighth, his command came upon horses belonging to the Palouse.
Wright’s dragoons wrangled in eight hundred and nine mounts, an
exact count taken to satisfy the Army’s penchant for recordkeeping.
Wright convened a board of officers to decide the horses’ fate. Official
policy discouraged horse slaughter. But this was war and all was fair,
the colonel reasoned. Keeping the beasts would invite raids, and they
were far too wild to herd east with the command. Slaughter was a
chance, he said, to strike a blow the Indians would never forget.
The board agreed with Wright: Horses gave Indians their best means of
resistance. “Without horses, redskins are powerless,” the board
declared in recommending slaughter. The record does not say whether
anyone dissented or spoke in the horses’ favor.
Troops were detailed to build a corral. The quartermaster chose the horses
one by one and sent them down to a river bar where the soldiers
ordered to take care of them first shot the older horses then crushed
the skulls of colts, causing the brood mares kept waiting to neigh long
into the night.
That sound, carrying far in the darkness, left its imprint on one soldier, a
corporal, who years later would weep whenever he heard horses
neighing in the night.
“A cruel sight,” the corporal wrote his wife, “to see so many noble
creatures shot down; even now I hear their forlorn appeal for our
mercy. It was not granted.”
The killing went on all night while Donati’s comet crossed the cold sky.
The Palouse warriors, held in chains, saw the falling stars as souls, the
souls of horses running free.
At dawn, with hundreds yet to kill, the officer in charge ordered two
companies to line the riverbank and fire volleys into the corral. A
contest was held to see who could kill the greatest number. Spirits
were high—a sign, the corporal’s letter said, of man’s ferocious
character.
Years after the troops had gone, the corral remained a midden, the
mounds of horsehair and bleached bones called by newly arrived
pioneers “Wright’s Boneyard.”
Wright himself, in his log and on the map he made to accompany his
report, settled on a more straightforward name for the place. “This
happened,” he wrote, “at Horse Slaughter Camp.”
We never found any skeletal remains at the site. But we carried away the
bones of the story, which stayed in our memory and changed the way
we understood the history of the place we called home.