By H.L. Delaney · August 24, 2026

Naming the Perpetrator: Why Our Books Keep the Names On

There is a house style in American frontier history that turns decisions into events and men into conditions. We edit against it on purpose, and this is the rule we use.

The grammar of disappearing

Read enough county histories and interpretive signs and you start hearing the same constructions. Settlers came into conflict with the local tribes. Hostilities broke out. A skirmish occurred. Lives were lost. The village was destroyed.

Every one of those sentences is missing the same word, which is the name of whoever decided. The grammar is doing work. It converts a choice made by a person on a particular morning into something closer to weather, and weather cannot be held responsible, prosecuted, or apologized for.

It is not always deliberate. A great deal of it is inherited from sources that had reasons, and then copied by people who did not examine what they were copying. The effect is the same either way.

The rule

Where the documented record names the person who made the decision, our books name that person. Ben Wright called the parley on the Lost River in 1852 and gave the signal to fire on the people who came to it. Frémont declined to take three unarmed men prisoner at San Rafael and said so out loud. Those are not anonymous frontier occurrences and we do not print them as though they were.

The rule runs in both directions, and the second direction matters as much. Native people get their names too. Kintpuash, not the renegade chief. Winema, whose choices in the peace tent were hers. Sagundai and Swanok, who rode with an expedition that did not enter most of them in the roster. Collective nouns are the same erasure with a friendlier face, and a book that names every officer while writing the Indians has already decided who counts as a person.

What we do where the record is silent

We say so, in the text, and we do not smooth it.

The Modoc dead at Ben Wright's parley are given in the sources as a range between thirty and ninety, with no list of names, because nobody with a pen thought counting them mattered. Writing that as roughly sixty would be tidier and would also be a small lie about how much anyone cared. The gap is evidence and it stays visible.

The same applies to disputed responsibility. Where accounts conflict, we set the conflict on the page and say who benefited from which version. That is not neutrality. It is refusing to resolve something the record cannot resolve, while still naming what everyone agrees happened.

Massacre is a word we use

When an armed party attacked people who had been invited to a peace meeting, that is a massacre, and calling it a battle is an editorial position rather than a cautious one. We choose the accurate word and we put the sourcing behind it.

Every claim in our books and apps traces to something citable. Why we publish the source register covers how that works and why it is public rather than internal. It is also the mechanism that keeps this policy honest, because a rule about naming perpetrators is only defensible if a reader can check the naming.

The limits

Naming a person is not convicting one, and we are careful about the difference. A documented order is a documented order. An inference about someone's private intent is an inference, and where a book of ours reaches for one, the author's note marks it as reaching. How we edit for accuracy goes through that process in more detail.

The reason we hold the line at all is simple enough. These events have descendants on both sides, in towns that are still there. A history that dissolves the people who decided into a fog of circumstance is not gentler to anyone. It is only gentler to the memory of the men who decided, and they have had the softer version for a hundred and fifty years.

Basalt Sea Press is a Native-owned press publishing land-rooted fiction and Indigenous origin stories. What we publish, and why Native-owned covers the rest of it.