A Borderlands Massacre
and the Violence of History

The Shadows at Dawn website utilizes the rich array of primary sources generated by a single, troubling event–the Camp Grant Massacre of 1871–to illuminate the world of the mid-nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This world was home to an unusually diverse collection of human communities: Anglo Americans, Mexican Americans, Tohono O'odham and Apache Indians. The records available on this site mirror this diversity and include court cases, Indian depredation claims, calendar sticks, newspaper articles, treaty negotiations, letters, speeches, early historical accounts, and U.S. Army reports.