Reading Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn in Disney’s Magic Kingdom: Contradictory Memories of American Conquest

Historian Karl Jacoby’s 2009 Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History presents the perspectives of the four groups involved leading up to the Camp Grant massacre of 1871, as well as each group’s ever-changing memories in the aftermath of violence. Perpetrated by the Americans, Mexicans, and O’odham, the Camp Grant massacre murdered and scalped over a hundred Apache women and children. Last month, I brought Shadows at Dawn on vacation to Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom because I was responsible for a TA-led discussion on it later that week. While packing, I thought that the heartwarming Magic Kingdom and heart-wrenching Shadows at Dawn were a paradoxical combination. This assumption was wrong. In reality, Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom and Karl Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn demonstrate opposite approaches to the same history of American conquest.

A central takeaway from Shadows at Dawn is that despite different quantities of remaining sources from the perpetrators and the victims, a chapter using official American government sources is about as reliable as a chapter that Jacoby strung together using circumstantial evidence from the Apache. Similarly, a chapter compiling information from Mexican newspapers is only as true as the chapter interpreting O’odham “calendar sticks,” which signified the O’odham’s method of recording the history that mattered to them.

Jacoby’s argument is not as simple as the winners write history. Or as Winston Churchill quipped, “history will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” To the contrary, Shadows at Dawn concludes that the historian’s critical interpretation, the official records from the times, and might I add Disney’s romanticizing what happened, all signify representations of memory. Like any good historian, Jacoby devotes extra care and sympathy toward the perspectives of the victims, the Apache. But this does not detract from the point that each group – Americans, Mexicans, O’odham, Apache, and I am adding Magic Kingdom – offers a different perspective on the same human affairs.

Thunder Mountain is one of Magic Kingdom’s two roller coasters. As the self-proclaimed “wildest ride in the west,” the Thunder Mountain roller coaster’s cars form a train. Railroads did indeed transform the American west, and the sights, sounds, and feel of this ride simulate Disney World’s interpretation of that nineteenth-century transformation. The other roller coaster in Magic Kingdom is the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train roller coaster. Based on the 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfsfilm, animatronic Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Bashful, and Dopey are working in the mines during the ride, singing “heigh ho.” Like railroads, the mines and the people who labored in them, sometimes to make others rich, did indeed transform the American west. Workers might have even sung.

Mines and railroads each play a central role in the latter half of Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn, which traces the aftermath of trauma. Readers learn that the American government confined both O’odham perpetrators and the remaining Apache to reservations, to make way for American conquest and expansion. American participants renounced their former Mexican allies due to race, to cement their own power. All perpetrators of the murder and scalping of over a hundred women and children soon found their economic status dependent on how well they adapted to the railroads and mining industry. Jacoby writes: “Almost overnight, the railroad ruptured the long-standing circuits of exchange in the region, shifting the dominant flow of trade from its north-south axis between Arizona and Sonora to an east-west orientation that linked Tucson to California and the Atlantic seaboard.” Visitors from across the country and world to Magic Kingdom experience Thunder Mountain from the perspective of riding in the train, not outside watching the innovation raze their environment. Vacationers likewise watch fictional Seven Dwarfs labor in the mines, resembling how Americans passed unpleasant labor to people they perceived as inferior.

Disney theme parks’ role in remembering history is nothing new. In 1995, Richard Francaviglia published “History after Disney: The Significance of ‘Imagineered’ Historical Places” in The Public Historian, arguing: “Disney’s portrayal of the past does indeed remain an issue for both public and academic historians. [The author] urges that we look more closely and dispassionately at the Disney Parks’ role in historical interpretation, for it can tell as much about popular perceptions of history and historic places.” Although Francaviglia mentions neither Native Americans nor violence, he proves that Disney is a window into American collective memory of history. He claims that Disney “replicated essences of historic environments through a complex process of selection and abstraction of landscape features or elements,” which applies to both roller coaster landscapes. “Frontierland,” notably Thunder Mountain, signifies “explicit testimony to the power of the frontier experience in shaping America’s image of itself. Like most Americans, Disney looked west for adventure.” Although Jacoby would not call it “adventure,” Shadows at Dawninterprets the same westward expansion and conquest.

Maybe Magic Kingdom is a relaxing vacation destination precisely because it diverges from my daily life’s purpose of analyzing history critically. But while the “happiest place on earth” might be less critical, that should not isolate it from real American history and the complex processes of memory. I am by no means claiming that the fun rides should somehow incorporate these nuances. Instead, I am suggesting that Shadows at Dawn is the perfect book to bring on your next Disney trip to insert more balance into American collective memory.