LAWRENCE KS JOURNAL-WORLD: L. Frank Baum's fairy tale about a Kansas girl swept by a tornado to a magical world of munchkins and witches made both author and state synonymous with Oz . . . But one slice of the story is largely ignored . . . Step back in time to Aberdeen, SD, in late 1890. Conflict among white settlers and American Indians was intense. It was a decade before "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" became a bestseller. Salesman, typesetter, press operator and editor L. Frank Baum was the publisher of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. It was in the pages of his weekly newspaper that Baum left his mark as a racist who repeatedly called for the mass murder of American Indians. Baum's first appeal for genocide was printed immediately after the slaying of Sitting Bull and 10 days before US Army troops, supported by Indian mercenaries, killed about 300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek, SD Here is what Baum wrote: "The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies, inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With this fall the nobility of the redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs. "The whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."
LAWRENCE JOURNAL-WORLD
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