In Hollywood's mid-20th Century hey day of Western movie-making, the U.S. Cavalry was always depicted as noble, heroic. A fiction, of course.
In Spokane's mid-20th Century, "loyal citizens" erected a monument to the U.S. Cavalry for what was described as their noble and heroic role in preventing northwest native peoples from waging war on white settlers. Cyclists on The Centennial Trail will find the monument right on the side of the river, about 10 miles east of town.
The monument carries an inscription: "In 1858, Colonel George Wright with 700 soldiers was sent from Walla Walla to suppress an indian outbreak. After defeating the indians in two battles, he captured 800 indian horses. To prevent the indians from waging further warfare, he killed the horses on the bank directly north of this monument, erected 1946."
Really? A more accurate inscription might read as follows: "In 1858, Native Americans who had been displaced from their ancestral hunting lands were driven to raiding pioneers' homesteads in order to feed their families. The U.S. Army was called upon to kill native warriors in a great 'ethnic cleansing.' The Army also cruelly killed the natives' horses, thereby denying them the means to hunt and sustain an independent livelihood."
The tragedy of this local genocide is all the more profound when one considers that the native people had lived in the Spokane area for a very long time. The Spokane tribe, ("children of the sun" in the Salishan language) are believed to be descended from ancestors whose local remains have been dated to 8,000-13,000 years ago. For all those millennia, the Spokane people were hunter-gatherers who lived off plentiful fish and game... until European settlers ruthlessly destroyed their way of life in a matter of a few decades.
If it's now right to be removing statues of dubious "heroes" all across America, wouldn't it be right to remove this monument?
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