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Truth tellers are a pain. They challenge our comfortable interpretations. They make us work. They make our brains get out of bed. They complicate matters and shake up our simple unevolved conclusions.
Best to be rid of them...
In August 1854, somewhere out Wyoming-way, an American Indian shot an American cow, butchered it and ate it with his village. Conquering Bear, the man whom the Americans regarded as chief, saw the trouble in this.
He immediately rode to Fort Laramie, and in accordance with treaty, offered payment for the cow. The Americans insisted, instead, contrary to treaty, that the brave who killed the cow turn himself in.
The problem was, of course, as Bob Drury and Tom Clavin write in their incredibly eye-opening 2013 book, The Heart of Everything that Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend, there was absolutely no way even a chief could get an Indian to turn himself in and put himself at the mercy of the "Bluecoat" justice system. This had not gone well for them in the past.
Thus, the next day Lieutenant John Grattan, a young fire breather itching for a fight, gathered together a twelve-pound field piece, a snub-nosed howitzer and forty energized volunteers (he had to turn a number of enthusiasts away) and marched on the Indian village to find and punish the perpetrators.
Conquering Bear tried again to intercede. As the Americans were leveling their artillery at the Indian village, he asked Lieutenant Grattan to hold fire until he could appeal to the offending man one more time.
As the chief rode away to do just that, a dozen Indians emerged from a teepee prepping their muskets.
Grattan, instead of heeding the Chief's plea, ordered his men to form a skirmish line. One soldier couldn't wait. He fired and a brave fell dead.
Grattan followed that up by ordering all of his men to fire into the village.
Hearing the guns exploding, Conquering Bear turned and tried to wave off Grattan. Too, he exhorted his own braves to not return fire. Just then he was hit and fell to the ground fatally wounded.
The Indian braves now opened up on the soldiers, a mixture of bullets and arrows scorching the air. And, as Drury and Clavin write, "it was over in minutes." Grattan and almost all of his men, they write, were killed on the spot.
By the next morning, the spin doctors were already at work.
"The 'Grattan Massacre,'" the authors write, "was already curdling. It was now the devious Conquering Bear who had lured the innocent soldiers into a trap."
Of course, those that had remained at Fort Laramie, soldiers and traders alike, knew the truth, but this lie was better for their careers and reputations...and better for business.
White attitudes about the Indians crystalized across the country all the way to Washington D.C. Cries for revenge "reverberated from the Platte to the Missouri and, eventually, on to the Potomac."
And then Drury and Clavin write this:
"When the rare voice was raised asking why, if the Sioux had taken to the warpath, there had been no follow-up raids on the trading posts or emigrant trains, it was shouted down with the all-purpose charge 'Indian Lover.'"
And that's how we rid ourselves of truth tellers when we don't want to bother with their truth. We conveniently categorize them. We label them away.
In the hellish American West of the 1800s it was "Indian Lover."
In our place of business it might be "negative" or "trouble" or "attitude problems" or "not a team player," while neatly showing them the door.
On the other hand...
How many great leaders have stayed on the straight and narrow because they were smart enough to surround themselves with people who would hold them accountable with the truth?
Of course, people who are contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian are simply irritating. Still, as an old preacher said to me once, "Better a little wildfire than no fire at all."
Better to have too much truth, than not enough of it.
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