“Blood of the Conquerors”: Violent Vernacular and Atrocities against Apaches in the 19th-Century American Southwest

The settlement of the American Southwest in the nineteenth century involved a complex entanglement of both categorization and containment of local Mexican populations as well as the attempted extermination, incarceration, or exile of Indigenous peoples. In the case of Apaches in territorial Arizona, the periodic pursuit of violent policies by both the citizenry and state actors coincided with a disturbing escalation in exterminationist rhetoric in regional print media of the time. These documents reveal much about the ways in which frontier cultures viewed indigenous peoples, and the ways in which words can escalate into violence in the right circumstances.

In this borderlands world, local print media worked in tandem with populations to ignite violence during moments of societal crisis, using Apache groups, peaceful and non, as scapegoats for increasingly complicated society that straddled two worlds. At a time, Anglo- American settler colonialism collided with Mexican-settler colonialism against Apache peoples that had fought a war of attrition with Latino peoples for centuries. The resulting collision paired with various social calamities, from the American Civil War to Mexican rebellions south of the border, fed cycles of violence and escalation that would ultimately lead to genocidal acts against Apache peoples. Using perpetrator theories gleaned from genocide and atrocity studies, this work creates a roadmap for mass violence against minorities using print media from settler journals to newspapers as its guide. Additionally, this investigation reveals the broader impact of this language on the majority cultures that used it.