On Limitations to the Use of Some Anthropologic Data

by John Wesley Powell

Now, for another example. Peschel, in The Races of Man (page 151), says:

The transatlantic history of Spain has no case comparable in iniquity to the act of the Portuguese in Brazil, who deposited the clothes of scarlet-fever or small-pox patients on the hunting grounds of the natives, in order to spread the pestilence among them; and of the North Americans, who used strychnine to poison the wells which the Redskins were in the habit of visiting in the deserts of Utah; of the wives of Australian settlers, who, in times of famine, mixed arsenic with the meal which they gave to starving natives.

In a foot-note on the same page, Burton is given as authority for the statement that the people of the United States poisoned the wells of the redskins.

Referring to Burton, in The City of the Saints (page 474), we find him saying:

The Yuta claim, like the Shoshonee, descent from an ancient people that immigrated into their present seats from the Northwest. During the last thirty years they have considerably decreased, according to the mountaineers, and have been demoralized mentally and physically by the emigrants. Formerly they were friendly, now they are often at war with the intruders. As in Australia, arsenic and corrosive sublimate in springs and provisions have diminished their number.

Now, why did Burton make this statement? In the same volume he describes the Mountain Meadow massacre, and gives the story as related by the actors therein. It is well known that the men who were engaged in this affair tried to shield themselves by diligently publishing that it was a massacre by Indians incensed at the travelers because they had poisoned certain springs at which the Indians were wont to obtain their supplies of water. When Mr. Burton was in Salt Lake City he, doubtless, heard these stories.

So the falsehoods of a murderer, told to hide his crime, have gone into history as facts characteristic of the people of the United States in their treatment of the Indians. In the paragraph quoted from Burton some other errors occur. The Utes and Shoshonis do not claim to have descended from an ancient people that immigrated into their present seats from the Northwest. Most of these tribes, perhaps all, have myths of their creation in the very regions now inhabited by them.

Again, these Indians have not been demoralized mentally or physically by the emigrants, but have made great progress toward civilization.

The whole account of the Utes and Shoshonis given in this portion of the book is so mixed with error as to be valueless, and bears intrinsic evidence of having been derived from ignorant frontiersmen.

Turning now to the first volume of Spencer's Principles of Sociology (page 149), we find him saying: