History May Be Written in Stone, But Is It the Truth?

Forget for a moment about overpaying for airline tickets or being gouged by a hotel or hustled at a sidewalk cafe. There’s another long-standing con game victimizing tourists, and in the long run, the stakes are higher.

It’s fibs about history. They may be fibs by guides, guidebooks or historical markers, omissions or euphemisms out of tact or embarrassment or racism or patriotism. But in any form, bad history warps our view of the world. And if you’re a traveler looking for information in the United States--especially information about Native Americans and the Civil War--an intriguing new book argues that bad history is everywhere.

The author is James W. Loewen, and the title is “Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong” ($26.95, 480 pages), published in New York by the New Press, a nonprofit venture aimed at airing social issues that commercial publishers might not find marketable.

Loewen’s last book was “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” a critical analysis of errors, omissions and (to borrow a term from Huckleberry Finn) “stretchers” in 12 popular American high school history texts. (Some publishers may not have found that marketable, but the book, released in 1995, sold more than 750,000 copies.) The new volume applies the same skepticism to more than 100 historical sites, markers and outdoor museums.

“Where do Americans learn about the past?” Loewen asks.

A similar idea darted through my mind five years ago during a visit to the town square of otherwise charming Oxford, Miss. Peering down, there I found a monument to the Confederate soldiers who died in defense of slavery and Southern self-determination.

“They gave their lives in a just and holy cause,” said the marker, erected in 1907.

Just? Holy? Really? Perhaps this was more a matter of opinion than fact, but still, I started thinking about how we speak to ourselves and sometimes deceive ourselves through our monuments.

Plenty of other people had been thinking about it too. In a later visit to the Little Bighorn Battlefield, the southern Montana site where George Custer lost his last skirmish in 1876, I found an old stone marker dedicated to the officers and soldiers killed “while clearing the district . . . of hostile Indians.” Nearby, a newer marker spun the story differently. It cited “our fallen heroes, both Indian and white, who gave their last full measure in defense of their country.” And there’s more: In 1991, Congress changed the site’s name from Custer Battlefield to Little Bighorn Battlefield.

Loewen’s examples, gathered during travels and reviews of state records from 1994-98, don’t include Little Bighorn or Oxford. But they cover the country from one end to the other, and he views his mission broadly enough to veer from lie-detecting to the airing of underexposed facts. For instance:

* King County, Wash., which includes Seattle, was first named for U.S. Vice President Rufus King, who hailed from Alabama, served in the 1850s and argued strongly in favor of slavery. But in 1986, Loewen reports, local officials renamed the county for Martin Luther King Jr. “Not even a sheet of letterhead had to be discarded,” Loewen reports.

* Tennessee devotes more than 30 state historical markers, a pair of statues, a pair of obelisks and a state park to Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, more markers than any other state devotes to one person, Loewen notes. But in their various accounts of his birth, battles and death, most overlook that Forrest, a slave trader, was the first Grand Wizard of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan before resigning in 1869.

* Throughout the 1990s, visitors to the historic site of the “Mountain Meadows Massacre,” about 30 miles north of St. George, Utah, found a 1990 historical marker recalling the 1857 slaughter in which scores of westbound emigrants from Arkansas were ambushed and killed, many in cold blood, under a flag of truce. The marker said only that the group “was attacked,” but not by whom.

In fact, the killing was led by Mormon militants, who anticipated war with the federal government. Apparently the militants had help from Paiute Indians, but it was a Mormon militia leader, John D. Lee, who was executed in 1877 for the massacre. Why didn’t the marker tell the full story? Because, Loewen writes, the Mormon church bought property there in the 1960s and chose the wording of the marker, with the tacit approval of state officials.

In September, after Loewen had finished researching his book, top Mormon church officials joined in the dedication of a new plaque that identifies the attackers and some of the circumstances.

The book brims with fascinating history, but the author sometimes comes off a bit strident. For instance, he hints that the National Park Service let Ulysses S. Grant’s tomb in Manhattan languish under trash and graffiti for most of the 20th century because mainstream historians were reluctant to acknowledge the achievements of a man central to the emancipation of African Americans.

And it’s certainly valuable to remember that every historic marker (and, for that matter, every history book and newspaper article) gives clues to at least two stories: the event described and the prevailing perception of that event.

Meanwhile, Loewen has the rest of the world to consider for sequels: how the Russians have treated their Soviet era (where are all those Lenin and Stalin statues now?); or how Muslims, Jews and Christians negotiate the labeling of and access to Jerusalem’s significant sites.

At home or abroad, rich rewards await those who remember that just because something’s chiseled in stone doesn’t mean it’s chiseled in stone.

Christopher Reynolds welcomes comments and suggestions, but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053, or send e-mail to chris.reynolds@latimes.com.