People talking about what we should change because it’s correcting
mistakes of the past for the present or shouldn’t change because it’s
denying the reality of history has me thinking about Grandstaff Canyon.
It’s one of the most beautiful trails in the Moab, Utah area, and it
has a history to it. Brace yourselves, because it was once known as
“Nigger Bill Canyon.” I think you’d be awfully hard-pressed to find
many people who would seriously defend keeping that name if it were as
it still stood today. It’s a strange word to carry so much weight;
those who use it in its basic form have often been associated with
illiteracy, low standing, vulgarity and contempt for not only people but
good manners; but it’s born out of slovenly pronunciation of the once
perfectly acceptable “negro,” the Spanish word for black, and “nègre,”
the French word for black. The southeast regions of the United States
where slavery was most commonly practiced were previously colonized by
the Spanish and French (incidentally, Jamestown 1619 has recently been
played up as the origins of enslaved Africans in America, inexplicably
bypassing the stories of those brought to modern day Georgia in 1526 and
Florida in 1539), and some of these words were inherited as the region
became part of the United States. Negro, colored or black were
considered suitable by polite and educated society (as polite and/or
educated as that society themselves may have actually been), however,
throughout most of early American history.
Nigger Bill Canyon
would have been considered a crude and flippant name by many people when
it was first applied in the late 19th century. With the large societal
change in the mid-20th century brought about with the Civil Rights
Movement, the canyon became “Negro Bill Canyon,” a socially acceptable
adaptation of the old unacceptable name. Now, “canyon” is actually an
English appropriation of the Spanish word cañon, used specifically to
refer to the narrow valleys and corridors of the American landscape,
derived from the word “caño,” meaning a tube or a spout, and the Spanish
spelling was still in common use in American writings during late 19th
century western expansion. So, maybe it doesn’t mean much, but it could
be argued that Negro Bill Canyon is fully a Spanish name meaning Black
Bill Canyon, but it isn’t. It was named Negro Bill Canyon because the
nearby settlers associated that canyon with Bill, and they associated
Bill with the color of his skin. Now, about Bill...
William
Grandstaff was a cowboy, part African-American, part-American Indian,
probably all man. He and a business partner we know only as “Frenchie”
came to the Moab area in 1877, where the Mormon pioneers had abandoned a
settlement due the Ute attacks in the 1850s. By the 1870s, Utah’s
native tribes had largely been subjugated and relocated to reservations
in Duchesne and elsewhere, and shortly after Grandstaff and Frenchie
began herding cattle in Moab, other settlers started returning to the
area. It was a common practice in southern and southeastern Utah to use
the canyons as a natural corral for livestock, which is what Grandstaff
did with this canyon along the Colorado River. He was a successful
businessman by all appearances, with 40 head of cattle and two ice
houses. According to census records, he was born in Alabama around
1840, and his parents came from Louisiana, so it seems likely began his
life in slavery, but we have no way of actually knowing.
In 1881,
violence occurred in the area in the form of a Paiute uprising, and
people were killed. White settlers and Paiute warriors engaged each
other in battle some 20 miles from Moab in the Pinhook Valley, leaving
10 men from Moab and Colorado dead and an unknown number of Paiute men.
Grandstaff may have selling whiskey to the local Indians. It’s
possible it was a scurrilous and racially motivated accusation, but if
people believed he was selling alcohol to Indians and now people had
been killed, it wouldn’t matter much if he was black, white, or
heliotrope. Anyone would have been prone to a lynching in that kind of
situation, but being black couldn’t have helped his case in that time
and place. So Grandstaff lit off in the middle of the night, abandoning
his cattle and property in a bid for his life. He resurfaced some 170
miles to the northeast in Glenwood Springs, Colorado some years later,
dying of natural causes there in 1901.
Until five years ago, the
canyon where William Grandstaff corralled his cattle bore his name in
the form of Negro Bill Canyon. Again, negro is simply Spanish and
Portuguese for ‘black,’ and capitalized as Negro, it was the polite,
officious, educated term for the first half of the 20th century, but not
at all long after the name changed to Negro Bill Canyon, the
connotations of the word Negro changed. Some civil rights movement
leaders felt the word was too tied to the history of slavery and
segregation, and “black,” which itself had been considered questionable
before, became more acceptable, along with Afro-American and other
variations. After the murder of 9 people at the historic Mother Emanuel
black church by a white supremacist shocked the nation in 2015, the
Moab city council deliberated over whether a change was in order. The
idea of changing the name to modern terminology like African American
Bill or Black Bill sounds ridiculous and exposes how absurd and
reductive a name like Negro Bill Canyon was, but to be fair, we don’t
know if the people who knew him actually called him Negro Bill (or, you
know, that other name) or even Bill, and whether he identified with that
moniker or would have thought it obnoxious. [Incidentally, the famous
outlaw Black Bart was a white man of English descent.] The President of
the NAACP in Salt Lake argued the name wasn’t offensive and expressed
concern that a name change would hide away a valuable piece of black
history. However, this turned out to be an case where a name could be
changed while continuing to recognize the historic figure of the earlier
name, and where there was not an obvious reason to no longer recognize
that place in a way that tied it to that historic figure. So it became
Grandstaff Canyon, and a sign explaining the name and who William
Grandstaff was stands at the trailhead.
When it comes these kinds
of changes, they’re mostly symbolic, but occasionally there is some
meaning. We do need to be mindful of what purpose we serve by making
these changes and what we really stand to lose or gain, outside of
simple emotional attachment. Simply keeping things unchanged is not a
meaningful or useful preservation of history any more than flippantly
changing names or removing monuments without respect to their original
intentions is a meaningful gesture of societal change. Grandstaff
Canyon is an example of a good change that, while still being a largely
symbolic gesture, manages to update a landmark’s name to something
without the distractingly outdated semantics while continuing to
recognize William Grandstaff. The historical context remains, as it
should. There are other names in Utah with words that have become
distractingly controversial that cannot be changed as easily without the
loss of valuable historical context.
One that comes to mind is Squaw
Peak. “Squaw” is similar to Negro in being a seemingly innocuous word
appropriated by English from another language, but within English, it’s
become associated with stereotypes and outdated language. The exact
origins of the word are uncertain and debated, but it seems to have come
about as an imperfect understanding of a root word for “woman” common
to multiple eastern American Indian languages. Basically, it’s what
English and French colonials thought American natives were calling
women. As European-descended settlements expanded further west, with
all the racist violence and atrocities that movement entailed, the word
accumulated an increasingly loaded, pejorative association.
Squaw Peak
was not named in what most would necessarily call someone’s honor, but
in recognition of someone’s loss and pain. In the aftermath of the
Battle at Fort Provo in which the Mormon settlers ultimately and
permanently subdued the Timpanogos people who occupied the Utah Valley,
the surviving Timpanogos of Old Elk’s village fled into Rock Canyon east
of modern Provo. According to legend, Old Elk had a beautiful wife who
eluded the pursuing Mormon militia to the top of a prominent, rocky
peak overlooking the canyon and leapt to her death rather than be
captured. While there are sufficient records of the battle and the
pursuit into Rock Canyon, the suicide of Old Elk’s wife may or may not
be legendary. True or not, the naming of this highly
noticeable peak overlooking the Utah Valley tells us something about how the
bloody origins of their towns reverberated in the hearts and minds of the pioneers and certainly speaks to a non-literal truth in the least.
Most people living in the shadow of Squaw Peak do not know this history behind the name, perhaps any more than visitors to Grandstaff Canyon would know anything of who William Grandstaff was without the sign that placed at the trailhead at the time of that name change. A lot of people who see it on a regular basis may not even know it is called Squaw Peak; the only identifying markers I know of are a couple road signs directing toward Squaw Peak Road from U.S. Route 189, and a faded boulder marking the Squaw Peak hiking trail from Rock Canyon, Provo. It is the way with many place names and other remnants from our history. Many people who don't want a statue removed because doing so would be denying or erasing history only have the most base possible idea of the history they're defending. A statue of Robert E. Lee on a pedestal in a city square sends a different message about what a community values than a statue or bust of Robert E. Lee in a museum or on a historical Civil War battleground. Just the same, many people who want names that smack of outdated semantics or statues removed sometimes fail to take into account the original meaning of these names and statues and the human complexity they represent. Let's be honest, an awful lot of people yelling at each other about this think that Pocahontas was a part of the First Thanksgiving story. Most decent, educated folk wouldn't use the word squaw in regular conversation today and for good reason. Regardless of its origins, at least for now, it is a piece of relatively recent and raw history that has become associated with crude and hateful conduct, and most of us wouldn't want to be mistaken for perpetuating those sentiments. Yet, in the context of this Squaw Peak, it does not mean the same thing, and still, it is a relic of another time. If the name of Old Elk's wife appeared anywhere in the historical record, maybe it would be a good idea to change the peak's name in her honor, but suggestions that have been put forward like "Lookout Peak" actually do make a valuable piece of history less accessible. It may not erase history, and these events could still be learned about from books, but it would cut off one of the surprisingly few local access points to this important history.
Meanwhile, an interesting development occurs in Salt Lake City's Fort Douglas Cemetery; one of three gravestones in all the United States military cemeteries that bears the swastika is scheduled for removal by the Veteran's Administration. The swastika is one of the most ancient symbols in human history, dating back 12,000 years in examples of prehistoric art, and for 99% of that span, its meaning has been benevolent, representing good fortune, well-being and spiritual powers. The swastika on Paul Eilert's tombstone was carved after that, when it was becoming the widely recognized symbol of hate, racism, intolerance and genocide it is today. The year was 1944, a little less than year after the true extent of Nazi Germany's uniquely evil deeds became internationally known with the discovery of extermination camps, the most systematic and industrialized practice of mass killing the human world has known. Even before that, the world community knew of many evils committed by the Third Reich, but the Allied Powers' hands weren't entirely clean themselves, and earlier enemies that had once been recognized during wartime as the greatest existential threat the world had ever known had already comfortably passed into history. On the other side of the cemetery, in the southwest corner stands one of its most prominent monuments, dedicated in 1933 (just a few months after Hitler came to power) to 21 German prisoners of war who died while being held at Fort Douglas during World War I. The Germans of World War II and Adolf Hitler were the best thing to ever happen for the reputations of the Germans of World War I and Kaiser Wilhelm II, because prior to the Nazis, the Germans of World War I were featured heavily in propaganda as "huns," the brutal, power-hungry, baby-killing monsters who committed the "Rape of Belgium." By 1933, they had a monument in the United States Army's Fort Douglas Cemetery. The monument was restored in 1988, with a plaque added, part of which reads in English and German, "Today the restored monument stands in of [sic] the victims of both World Wars who are buried here in Fort Douglas Cemetery and to the victims of war and despotism throughout the world."
We know very little about the man who was Paul Eilert, except what we
can glean from the circumstances directly leading to his interment. He
was born in 1905, most likely born in the German Empire, which would
have been under the rule of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and young Paul would have
been about 13 when Wilhelm II abdicated the throne and Germany suffered
an ignominious defeat at the end of the Great War. After struggling
through the lean war years and the Spanish Flu epidemic, Paul's
formative years would have taken place in a demilitarized, demoralized
and economically devastated Germany, and despite the progressive culture
of the Weimar Republic, he would have been surrounded by crushing
poverty and political unrest. In the 1930s, in his late 20s and early
30s, Paul would have seen a return to national prosperity in the
controversial form of the Nazi Party, led by charismatic strong man
leader Adolf Hitler. He would have seen opposition to Hitler and the
Nazis as well, for their vicious anti-Semitism, their aggressive
militarism and imperialism, and the cult of personality around Hitler as
an infallible leader. He may have been hesitant about it or he may
have been all in from the start, but we don't know. We don't know if he
was an enlisted man or conscripted, whether he was a true believer in
the Nazi ideology or wore the uniform out of a misbegotten sense of
duty. Maybe the girl he liked wouldn't have sex with him if he didn't
join the Wehrmacht. Maybe he wanted the symbols of his service to Nazi
Germany engraved on a granite marker standing above his bones for a
thousand years, but maybe he couldn't have given less of a shit. He'd
been one of thousands of German and Italian prisoners of war being used
for work in the vicinity of Ogden, Utah, and he died of intestinal
cancer on June 8, 1944, two days after the Allied invasion of Normandy
on D-Day. Apparently, he had the respect of his fellow POWs, because
they pooled together their money to buy a special gravestone for him.
It's decorated with a German war medal, either a Knight's Cross or the
Iron Cross, with a small swastika in the center of the cross.
The Nazi iconography is so uniquely inflammatory in and of itself, perhaps it is right to remove the marker from its current place. It will be preserved in the National Cemetery Administration History Collection, but what exactly that means about if or where it could be seen by the public is unclear. Eilert was hardly the only Nazi soldier to die as a POW and receive a burial in a United States national cemetery, let alone the only one buried in the Fort Douglas Cemetery, but aside from two others in the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas also scheduled for removal, his grave is the only one engraved with a Nazi symbol. Presumably, the current marker will be replaced with a more innocuous one like those of his fellow POWs. Personally, I enjoy seeking out these seemingly outrageous monuments just to have seen them in person, especially if one is likely to be unseen again some time soon. On my pilgrimage to Paul Eilert's stateside Nazi grave, it was a little disconcerting to see his decorated more than any other headstone there, a miniature modern German tri-color flag on each side, a miniature American flag front and center, and more than a dozen coins on top, the sort that some people leave to show they paid their respects. No other grave held that many respects there that I saw. Perhaps people oughtn't to be paying respects at a Nazi grave, specifically the one Nazi grave bearing the symbols of the Third Reich, that they don't pay at the graves of men who fought for the United States and lie in neighboring soil. It's a curiosity of history that is delightful to some like me, but it can also be a galvanizing piece of marble. It is no harm in and of itself, but more innocuous headstones crumble time to time, and if anyone is there to care, they have been replaced.
As for crumbling monuments, just a matter of yards away from Eilert's grave in the Fort Douglas Cemetery is a small raised area of ground with a stone base and a sign: "Due to life-safety concerns created by monument settling and
shifting over the years, the Bear River Monument has been disassembled
and temporarily stored at the Fort Douglas Museum. The planning for the
restoration of the monument will begin in spring of 2019." Back in
2018, the Army contracted EverGreene Architectural Arts to restore the
monument which had been built in 1864 and determined the monument was at
risk of collapse. The soldiers of Fort Douglas who built the monument in recognition of their service at an event they knew as the Battle of Bear River, in which 21 of their
brothers in arms had been killed. Most of these were buried in the Fort
Douglas Cemetery where the monument commemorated their sacrifice.
Today, the battle is better known as the Bear River Massacre. In early 1863, the Mormon standoff with the United States federal
government had passed and the U.S. Army had an established presence in
the region to ensure the Utah Territory's compliance with federal laws
and to protect the overland mail routes and emigrant trails. The
circumstances leading up to the Bear River Massacre are complicated, but
the kind of tensions that were bubbling up in the Cache Valley of what
was then the northern Utah Territory and southeastern Washington
Territory were similar to those that formed between U.S. settlers and
indigenous tribes across the American West at that time. Scarcity of
resources, culture clashes, previous instances of rogue violence and
racial hostilities were all involved, and there was the added factor of a
Civil War taking place a thousand miles away where soldiers of the
Union Army were earning "glory" on the battlefield. The regiments at
Fort Douglas were made up of volunteers from California, and they were
scrapping for a fight of their own. After an attack on miners by
Shoshone raiders occurred on the Montana Trail through the Bear River
Valley, Territorial Supreme Court Chief Justice John F. Kinney issued a
warrant for the arrest of three Shoshone tribal leaders, including Bear
Hunter, whose large village's winter camp sat along the Bear River 110
miles north of Salt Lake City in what was then Washington Territory, and
the soldiers at Fort Douglas, led by Irish-born Colonel Patrick Connor,
took this as an opportunity.
Colonel Connor led approximately 200 men
to Bear River, each man carrying 40 rounds of rifle ammunition and 30
rounds of pistol ammunition, while the company hauled two howitzers (a
small type of cannon) with 100 rounds each, arriving early in the
morning of January 29, 1863. Even with the howitzers caught in a snow
drift, Bear Hunter's village was far outmatched by the weapons of
Connor's regiments. The cavalry of about 100 men arrived first, and
while the details of any attempt at parleying are unclear, but it must
have been short. 21 of Connor's men were killed in the course of a few
hours, most of them in the initial assault when the Shoshone were able
to drive the soldiers back with the relatively few guns they had
accumulated in their raids, skirmishes, and trading with settlers and
trappers over the years. When the cavalry arrived shortly after, the
regiments regrouped and charged back into the camp, and this time, it
would be a slaughter. Soldiers charged through the camp shooting,
hacking, slashing, bludgeoning, maiming and killing the people of Bear
Hunter's village. Despite the frigid temperatures, some of the Shoshone
escaped to hide in the river, but some were swept away by the current,
succumbed to hypothermia or drowned. The exact number of Shoshone
killed in the Bear River Massacre is unknown, but it's almost certainly
the deadliest single massacre event ever committed against American
Indians by the United States military. The official report from Fort
Douglas was that 240 Shoshone people were killed in the "battle," while
some contemporary accounts put it as high as 500 killed. Historians
estimate the actual number to be somewhere in the middle, around 250 to
350 men, women and children. That's well more than the estimated
130-250 Sioux people killed at Wounded Knee, and while the details are
not as lurid, it's more than double the usual estimate of 160 Cheyenne
and Arapaho people killed at the infamous Sand Creek Massacre. This is commemorated by the Bear River Monument crumbling under the
ravages of time in the middle of the Fort Douglas Cemetery.
 |
| Colonel
Connor is buried in the cemetery, with a large marker in the form of a
reddish boulder and a metal relief that lists his service in the "Battle
of Bear River" and other military campaigns against American Indians,
and identifies him as the "Father of Utah Mining," for promoting the
potential for resource extraction in the mountains of Utah. |
The dismantled Bear River Monument is currently held at the Fort Douglas Military Museum less than a mile from the cemetery.
The right and wrong sides of history are not incontrovertible ideas. In exploring our human history, there is a strong drive to overturn the existing common perceptions. This is our understanding of history evolves and remains consistent with our values, but there is no single true lens through which to understand the past or reality itself. It is very likely that things we are doing now because it is simply the way things are will be judged as the "banality of evil" by a future generation, or that actions we are taking to place ourselves on the "right side of history" will wind up doing exactly the opposite for our standing in the eyes of a more advanced future. There are not two sides to every story. There is no less than one perspective per person who present in a historical event, and the number of perspectives is multiplied exponentially when we understand that each of those persons probably had shifting and evolving views of their experiences throughout the remainder of their lifetimes. There are multiple strains of truth to every historical event, and they all contradict and compliment one another with astonishing fluidity. However, the economy of ideas is driven by supply and demand of one particularly vital resource, and that is attention. Nothing gets attention like passion, and people are rarely so passionate about anything as much as their anger. So while something simple to understand and prone to incite righteous indignation like a Nazi icon on an otherwise unremarkable grave site is more likely to motivate change than the next door monument to possibly the deadliest single incident of racialized violence committed by agents of the state in United States history. Neither is worth glorifying, and neither should be hidden away. Ultimately, some names, symbols and monuments are changed because they are the lightning rods to attention, and some are slowly, relentlessly broken down by the immutable forces of nature and timely progression.
History is a fraught, ever-shifting landscape, and we are in the midst of its wilderness. Tread thoughtfully.
Sources
"Push on to rename 'Negro Bill Canyon' in Utah"
McCombs, Brady (November 26, 2012). Salt Lake Tribune. Associated Press
"Utah's Negro Bill Canyon renamed Grandstaff Canyon by federal board"
Burr, Thomas (October 12, 2017). Salt Lake Tribune.
Dana, Jen (May 12, 2008). Deseret News.
Associated Press (June 2, 2020). Salt Lake Tribune."The Search is On for the Site of the Worst Indian Massacre in U.S. History"
Wright, Sylvia (May 13, 2016). Smithsonianmag.com
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