The Hunt for Willie Boy: Indian-Hating & Popular Culture

In the popular imagination, the clash of Native American nations with Europeans is seen as a series of battles and massacres, of large events. History operates on much smaller increments, as Sandos and Burgess demonstrate in their study of an incident in California in 1909. A Chemehuevi Indian, Willie Boy, killed another Chemehuevi and kidnapped his daughter, whom he later also killed. Indian-on-Indian crime did not attract much attention in those days, but white law-enforcement officials decided to make a lesson of Willie Boy, whose "violence exemplified a 'return to savagery' of a supposedly assimilated Indian." Hunted by a huge posse, Willie Boy died by his own hand. But during the manhunt, sheriffs removed dozens of Indian families from their oases "for their own protection." Those families would never return.