How many people died in the War of Canudos?

A town nobody counted

To count the dead you need to know how many lived there, and no one ever took a census of Belo Monte, the town of the poor that Antônio Conselheiro founded in 1893 in the backlands of Bahia, known to history as Canudos. The one firm number is the houses. When the fighting was over, the army counted them: 5,200. From that, estimates of the population run from 10,000 to 25,000. The historian José Calasans, who spent decades interviewing survivors, thought the top figure exaggerated. Even the low figure made it one of the largest towns in the state.

The dead of Belo Monte

For the town’s side, estimates run from 10,000 to 20,000 dead, from fighting, hunger and thirst, over almost a year of war. A figure of 25,000 dead circulates widely. That figure is the same as the highest estimate of how many people lived there, the very number Calasans doubted.

The prisoners

The final assault began on October 1, 1897. The next day, Antônio Beatinho came out under a white flag and bargained with the general for the lives of those who would surrender. He came back with hundreds of women, children and old people, starving and wounded. The army’s hired photographer, Flávio de Barros, photographed them sitting on the ground. It became the most famous image of the war.

The promise was not kept. The men who had surrendered vanished the next morning, Beatinho among them, and many prisoners had their throats cut, a practice that Euclides da Cunha says became routine, accepted by the commanders. Orphaned children were carried off by soldiers and outside families as spoils of war. In Os Sertões, Euclides called the whole campaign a crime.

The last four, and the ones who got away

At dusk on October 5, the last defenders fell in a trench beside the new church. According to Euclides, there were four: “an old man, two grown men and a child.” Not everyone died. The trader Antônio Vilanova slipped out with his people along hidden trails in September, before the siege closed, and survivors later rebuilt a village on the ruins. Their memories, gathered by Calasans over decades, are how we know the town from the inside.

And the army?

A reliable total for the soldiers is harder to give. What the record does show, with dates:

• Uauá, November 1896. Ten soldiers died, and 150 sertanejos (backlanders) according to the official report.
• March 1897. Colonel Moreira César and Colonel Tamarindo, who took over from him, were both killed in the same disaster.
• The Favela hill, from June 1897. The fourth expedition held out for weeks, hungry and under fire, with hundreds of wounded.

Those soldiers brought home more than wounds. The word they carried back to Rio is in Where does the word favela come from?, and the whole war is in What was the War of Canudos?.