In his book Days of Tragedy in Armenia: Personal Experiences in Harpoot, 1915-1917, Riggs provides an important eyewitness account of the genocide and concluded that the deportation of Armenians was part of an extermination program organized by the Ottoman government.

[10] After growing up in the area, Riggs traveled to the United States where he acquired his education at the Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and the Auburn Theological Seminary, and graduated from 1902.

He recalls that "the Turkish authorities began a systematic build-up of hostility," dispensing "a great deal of fiction to prove that the Armenians were a disloyal element menacing the safety of the Turks.

"[12] He declared that the case brought up against the Armenians was ultimately "in the minds of the common Turkish people, in preparation of atrocities which were to follow.

[14]Riggs described in detail the procession out of the prison and how it ended: They followed the highway for about ten miles, and then were turned off toward the right, and marched up into the mountains.

These fugitives scattered and hid, but were pursued and hunted out by the relentless guards, who found and butchered them in their hiding places only one escaping, so far as known.

This young man, whose name I dare not reveal as he is still living in Turkey, succeeded in evading his pursuers and hiding till nightfall.

[15]Driven to death, threatened, outraged [raped], starved and perishing with thirst, it is not to be wondered at that the vast majority of the weary host lay down by the roadside to die.

During the summer of 1915, Riggs observed the transit camps of the deportees using a telescope and wrote that "for most of the women and children was reserved the long and lingering suffering that massacre seemed to them a merciful fate—suffering such as was foreseen and planned by the perpetrators of this horror.

Out of the 372,000 who had perished most had died from starvation and disease, but many thousands were also massacred at the last moment, when apparently the Turkish government had tired of the pretense of carrying out the theory of deportation.

The triumphant reestablishment of the Turkish sovereignty not only left that crime unpunished, but, in the mind of probably a majority of the Turks, the horrid course which they had pursued had been gloriously vindicated.