Baum’s genocide editorials

Baum uncharacteristically did write in support of genocide.  In an editorial of 1890, only five days after the murder of Sitting Bull, he wrote: “The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.  Why not annihilation?  Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in later ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroism.”

He wrote this for The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, while living in Aberdeen, in the brand new state of South Dakota. Nine days later came the massacre at Wounded Knee and he followed that up with another depressing editorial. There is no way to "whitewash" Baum's words. He meant it...

Out of this prairie rise the faces of dead men.
They speak to me. I can not tell you what they say.

Photo of Wounded Knee burial site: Jbutler18; lines of poetry: Carl Sandburg