Living in the era of antibiotics, we find it difficult to imagine the simultaneous deaths of siblings, parents, relatives, and friends. As if by a flash of grim light, Indian villages became societies of widows, widowers, and orphans; parents lost their children, and children were suddenly alone. Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust. “My people have been so unhappy for so long they wish to disincrease, rather than to multiply,” a Paiute woman wrote in 1883.
