SOCIETAL TRAUMA

   “This is the first instance in the criminal records of our state, of murder by a hired assassin; our manners, all our feelings, I trust are hostile to the growth of the crime; but let us not forbear to apply the whole energy of our laws to its prevention.”- D.A. Samuel R. Betts

   I’m not an assassin, but I am a killer—a hunter, not a farmer. I make this important distinction because, since both hunting and farming involve killing, only the farmer gets to cuddle his future meal. I have no problem trying to put an arrow or a bullet in a buck attempting to slip undetected through the old Denniston apple orchard; but I can’t imagine wringing the neck of one of my beloved roosters….just to have a chicken dinner. I have a lot of respect for farmers. I just can’t do it.

   The few times I’ve owned livestock, it’s been as raw material; a kind of living art installation, or as pets. I’ve bought chickens and offered them up for adoption, only to find out that the type of chicken I purchased had to be mercifully killed. Otherwise, the bionic birds’ breasts would grow so large, so fast, they would fall over and suffocate themselves. I had to change the certificates of adoption from “I promise not to kill,” to read, “I promise to kill,” The previously pardoned hens were none the wiser. Another time I bought a cow.

    My cow was branded as part of a performance, and trucked off to a farm outside of the east California town of Gridley to “live out her natural life.” Within a year, the cow broke out of her paddock and was killed by a neighbor’s pickup truck. I salted and preserved the steaks as art objects. Her “natural life” turned out to be only a year long. I still have those steaks.

    A few days ago, I had a late afternoon appointment with my Monticello lawyer, concerning a quit-claim deed on a little piece of property up the road. Instead of going home after the meeting to close up my rooster coop, (it being Tuesday) I chose to spend the night with Mrs. Osterhout. I gambled that the chickens would be okay. I lost the bet (or rather they did). I came home to silence—and an empty coop. Another senseless slaughter due to sex drive, and capitalist proclivities involving real estate.       

      

    In his later years, when asked why he so heartlessly butchered Indian children, Osterhout cousin Tom Quick explained, “Nits make lice.” In other words kill all the Indian kids you can, so they don’t grow up to make more Indian kids. The same excuse and exact phraseology was used years later by the brutal, ex- Methodist pastor Col. John M. Shivington, in Sand Creek Colorado. After the disemboweled and mutilated Cheyanne and Arapaho children at the Sand Creek massacre were brought to his attention, Col. Shivington stated matter of factly, “.…kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” Whether this was just a coincidence or Shivington directly quoting Quick is unclear. “Nits makes lice,” may have been a colloquial saying, employed as an acceptable excuse by any white man caught murdering Indian children.

      Mention of Tom Quick can still bring derision and scorn from the community at large. Rightfully so. Because there are so many Quicks hanging from the Osterhout tree, I feel a strange obligation to be a part of the discussion. A large monument to the “Indian slayer” was erected, with much fanfare, in Milford, PA. in the 1890’s. At the time Tom Quick was a lionized and fictionalized hero; a great “Indian killer” and proud American "patriot." 

     A century later, in the 1990’s, the Milford, Pennsylvania monument was vandalized and protested by Native Americans, outraged that at the cusp of the millennia a white man was still proudly memorialized as an “Indian Slayer.” This foreshadowing of the 21st century removal process of many racist, Confederate statues across the country, gives me a little satisfaction, as a member of my family was ahead of the curve. Cousin Tom’s obscene, granite, odalisque was one of the first to go.

    The collective mindset and propaganda of the time, perpetuated by many, including James E. Quinlan, who wrote “Tom Quick, Indian Slayer” (and even the beloved abolitionist William H. Seward), who favored Indian removal and extermination, was pervasive. Throughout the 19th century, the “final solution” propaganda directed at Native Americans continued unabated. Today, the racist drumbeat of white supremacy is picked up again with the official de-humanizing jingoism of immigrant “dogs,” “animals,” and “infestation.” The poverty of language is jarring to the senses, as legitimate vocabulary is replaced with insipid, lazy jargon. How many times can we hear “fantastic” or “disgraceful?” Coming to a sanctuary city near you!  We’ll see what happens.

     

    Could this murder conspiracy in Goshen be the “first time in the state?” Corporate and institutional conspiracy and assassination was so commonplace it was virtually invisible. But in the private sector, the family was another matter. In the Jennings murder trials one could clearly observe the inner workings of the family in the light of day. The clan, for whatever reason, played the whole process out in public, allowing the locals a front-row seat to their theater of societal absurdity and murderous pathology. Like Tom Quick—somebody had to be first.

    In November of 1818, a Goshen circuit court judge made his final decision. The first deed that Phoebe Teed had signed over to her brother Richard Jennings would be the one validated and legally honored. This declared all other quit-claim deeds to the property by David Conklin or James Teed invalid, null and void. The official property closing was scheduled for New Year’s day 1819.

     When the proceedings broke up, another decision was reached in the alley behind the courthouse, right where Claudius Smith’s skull had been dug up and mortared into the building. Richard Jennings would die and Jack Hodges and David Dunning would be paid to do it. Shake.