The Storm of the Teeth

"There's $100,000 worth of shit in that case," he notes.

Hobday became a war history buff after serving in Custer's unit, the Seventh Cavalry, during the Korean War. A great uncle of Hobday served in the Seventh Cavalry during the Battle of Wounded Knee, where soldiers massacred hundreds of women and children. The great uncle, an army cook, was among more than a dozen soldiers who were awarded a Medal of Honor for service at Wounded Knee, one of the more controversial such awards in U.S. history.

Hobday is an encyclopedia of turn-of-the-last-century Western U.S. military history. And he assesses that period from the perspective of his great uncle, a cavalryman. "Veterans from Wyoming were awarded more than any other veterans group in America for the Indian wars. That's where the Indians were doing a lot of the bloodletting," Hobday says.

Such words sound jarring in San Francisco, a city where many people have given up on the idea that Native Americans were aggressors in the Indian wars. But it's worth contemplating -- as Churchill prods us to when he clumsily asserts there's evil to be found in the mundane -- that Hobday's perspective is well within the American mainstream.

For instance: During the thick of the Indian wars, a certain Col. George M. Sliney led the Wyoming unit that Hobday describes. I'm not aware of a drive to revise history to re-characterize Sliney as a monster. He remains buried a hero.

Nobody gives the idea much thought, even within my largely liberal-minded family -- even though George M. Sliney is my great-great-grandfather.

There have, of late, been some official efforts to soften the effects of the callous attitude Americans have harbored up to present times toward their native hosts. Federal and state laws, for instance, now require public institutions possessing Indian remains to return them to members of the tribe they pertain to.

"The reason why Indian sites and Indian human remains are protected by federal and state laws now are because of the shameful treatment of Indian sites and remains in the last 150 years," notes Jeff Fentress, a San Francisco State University professor charged with making sure any such artifacts held by the school are returned to the appropriate tribe.

I mention such laws to Hobday just after he's finished expressing another volley of contempt for the activists who'd entered his bar.

"They said I'm supposed to go back and find the tribe she was supposed to be a member of," he said, nearly spitting.

"They" were referring to state and federal laws requiring repatriation of Indian remains, which, I told him, might not be enforceable against Eddie Rickenbackers, a privately owned bar.

"Just Indian remains? Why don't they have a law protecting white people's remains?" he asked.

Mostly, it's because of scientists, I said. They -- along with artifact collectors -- had gotten in the habit of digging up the bones of Indians for study, inciting fury among their native descendants, and refusing to give the bones back.

"I did not know that," Hobday said, in a voice quieter than I'd heard him use before. "I was not aware of that."

That sounded to me like the beginning of a fascinating discussion.

It's too bad the Human Rights Commission saw fit to nip it in the bud.