Violence and Imagination of the West

Mining Town of Bodie

Violence and Imagination of the West
Reading the section on violence in "Its your misfortune" I thought that it was interesting that White suggested the term genocide when he was discussing Indian Hunters and the killings in California, but never really came out and said it. He seems to imply that there might have been organized and systematic killing by providing examples of people paying "subscriptions to Indian hunters to "clean" up the area. The reading suggests that the violence was due more to a culture of fear and a need for labor. Anglo-American culture attempted to shrink and enslave the Indian populations of the west. White also suggests that they accomplished their goals by citing that California's Indian population shrunk from 150,000 at the beginning of the organized killings to 30,o00 by 1870.
This type of history is something that is rarely seen in our culture because it does not fit into our imagination of what the west is. The west is always viewed as a place where people could escape from authority and and establish themselves freely without any restraints. This section on violence paints a different picture; not just because of the Indian white relations, but also because of the violence shown against the working class of the west and the unions that they formed. In movies and books, violence is always shown when there are two clear sides, the good and the bad. As shown in this reading, violence was not always so simply divided. I think most of the violence in this reading have an underlying cause that can be traced back to economics, labor, and land.