Whitman Massacre Quotes

It is astonishing how ideas can change an experience. How we can be in a beautiful forest, on a hike through verdant beauty, but if someone told us that the forest was the site of a brutal massacre, the entire hike would be transformed. It would turn ominous and sad. Or if I was told the forest was where Walk Whitman had walked every morning before working on "Leaves of Grass," the place would take on a holy majesty. Same forest. Same trail and trees. But the idea layered on top of it mutates it, glorifies or damns it.

These people who came west to “civilize” the heathen—what made them decide to do that? To me it’s completely irrational to go into somebody else’s country and try to tell them how to think, how to pray, how to live, how to raise their children. —Roberta Conner, director, Tamástslikt Cultural Institute

A second case concerns Charles Whitman, the 1966 “Texas Tower” sniper who, after killing his wife and mother, opened fire atop a tower at the University of Texas in Austin, killing sixteen and wounding thirty-two, one of the first school massacres. Whitman was literally an Eagle Scout and childhood choirboy, a happily married engineering major with an IQ in the 99th percentile. In the prior year he had seen doctors, complaining of severe headaches and violent impulses (e.g., to shoot people from the campus tower). He left notes by the bodies of his wife and his mother, proclaiming love and puzzlement at his actions: “I cannot rationaly [sic] pinpoint any specific reason for [killing her],” and “let there be no doubt in your mind that I loved this woman with all my heart.” His suicide note requested an autopsy of his brain, and that any money he had be given to a mental health foundation. The autopsy proved his intuition correct—Whitman had a glioblastoma tumor pressing on his amygdala.

One marker, which I would read a bit later on, tells the familiar story of Narcissa Whitman, "trail-blazer and martyred missionary," who followed the north side of the Platte in 1836 on horseback, "becoming the first white women to cross the American continent," and who, along with her husband, Marcus, was "massacred by Cayuse Indians" at their Protestant mission in 1847 in Walla Walla, Washington. (The Indians there were justifiably enraged at the whites for spreading measles to them.)

Since mass and spree murder are essentially two manifestations of the same psychological phenomenon, a new term has recently been proposed that covers both kinds of crime. In a series of articles published shortly before the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre, The New York Times refers to figures like Dylan Klebold, Charles Whitman, and others as rampage killers—a highly expressive phrase that pinpoints the essential difference between these types of offenders and serial killers.

In those days, when Indians killed whites, it was a “massacre”; it was a “battle” when whites killed Indians.

It was a reminder that the past is a moving target, filtered through perspectives and values that change over time. Heroes and martyrs stand on shaky pedestals, even when, as in the case of Marcus Whitman, the pedestal is a seven-ton block of granite.

Glorifying the pioneers was a way to justify what had been done in the past and perhaps ease anxieties about the future—the solidity of stone and metal suggesting that the sons and daughters of the pioneers would continue to prevail.

Retribution or Revenge?” Visitors are asked to ponder whether the attack was “justified legal retribution, an act of revenge, or some combination of both.”29