1970;
451 pages. Full Title : Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the
American West. New Author? : Yes.
Genre : Non-Fiction; Native American
History; US History. Overall Rating : 9½*/10.
Back when I was a kid, I vaguely recall watching
a Walt Disney “made for TV” movie about Custer’s Last Stand and the sole
survivor of the 7th Cavalry force, a horse ridden by Captain Myles
Keogh named Comanche.
The horse really did survive the battle (you can read about him in Wikipedia here),
but obviously the storyline is completely fictional. For the time (1958), Disney did a decent job
of balancing the tale – which portrayed both Keogh and an Indian youth (played by a
very young Sal Mineo) in an equally positive light.
Alas, it was necessary to have some bloodthirsty Indian kill off Keogh
in the battle, which led to the only scene from the movie that has stayed with
me all these years. The horse Comanche,
enraged by its master’s slaying, in turn stomps the Indian warrior to
death. While all the other Indians just stand
around, watching passively.
It
occurs to me that Custer’s Last Stand is pretty much all I know about the
Indian wars that spanned the second half of the 19th century. And that all those John Wayne
cowboys-&-Indians movies were only showing us the white man’s version of
the events.
So
it was eye-opening to read about what went on from the Indian’s
point-of-view. In Dee Brown’s book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
What’s To Like...
Bury My Heart at
Wounded Knee consists of 19 chapters,, plus a short introduction by Dee
Brown. The first chapter is a quick
synopsis of how the Indians in the eastern half of the US fared between the
time the first white settlers came ashore until 1860, when the white man began crossing the Mississippi River into the Great Plains in huge numbers.
Each subsequent chapter features a different tribe or war chief, and starts off with
a “current events around the world” prologue which gives the reader a perspective of the
events about to unfold. There are also
49 photographs, mostly portraits of the various Indian leaders in the struggle. At the end, there’s a brief biography of
Dee Brown, which is worth taking time to read, plus sections for
Notes, Bibliography, and Index.
I
recognized a lot of the US army characters.
In addition to Custer, the Civil War generals William Sherman and Philip
Sheridan play major roles, and both were royal a$$holes to the Indians. Kit Carson was initially sympathetic to the
Indians, but eventually turned into their foe as well. The names of the Indian
leaders were less familiar to me. Here’s
a partial list of them, see how many you’ve heard of: Tecumseh, Pontiac, Red
Cloud, Manuelito, Roman Nose, Black Kettle, Ely Parker, Cochise, Geronimo,
Victorio, Captain Jack, Satanta, Quanah Parker, Lone Wolf, Gall, Chief Joseph,
and Ouray.
I
was surprised to learn that Custer’s Last Stand wasn’t the only time the
Indians won. The Fetterman Massacre won
a whole war for them, with the US abandoning several forts and withdrawing from
Indian territory, at least temporarily.
The Plains Indians also formed alliances with other tribes to fight the
American army, which I never knew.
There’s a brief reference to the origin of scalping, which I had heard
before. And since I’ve spent time in
Ponca City, Oklahoma, it was enlightening to read about the resistance put up
by the Ponca Indian tribe.
The book closes with a chapter devoted to Wounded Knee, as one last pitiful band
of Indians tries making a dash to freedom, deluded in the belief that by performing the
Ghost Dance, all the white people would disappear. Their flight, in the dead of winter, is mercilessly snuffed out, and the final photograph in the book shows the corpse of the Indian leader Big
Foot, after he’d frozen to death during the escape. It was the winter of 1890. In 2007, a eponymous movie was made based on
Dee Brown’s book; it won 6 Emmy awards and 17 nominations.
Excerpts...
“My God and my
mother live in the West, and I will not leave them. It is a tradition of my people that we must
never cross the three rivers – the Grande, the San Juan, the Colorado. Nor could I leave the Chuska Mountains. I was born there. I shall remain. I have nothing to lose but my life, and that they can come and take whenever
they please, but I will not move. I have
never done any wrong to the Americans or the Mexicans. I have never robbed. If I am killed, innocent blood will be shed.”
(loc. 592)
Crow Creek on the
Missouri River was the site chosen for the Santee reservation. The soil was barren, rainfall scanty, wild
game scarce, and the alkaline water unfit for drinking. Soon the surrounding hills were covered with
graves; of the 1,300 Santees brought there in 1863, less than a thousand
survived their first winter.
Among the
visitors to Crow Creek that year was a young Teton Sioux. He looked with pity upon his Santee cousins
and listened to their stories of the Americans who had taken their land and
driven them away. Truly, he thought,
that nation of white men is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and
destroys all who are in its path. Soon
they would take the buffalo country unless the hearts of the Indians were
strong enough to hold it. He resolved
that he would fight to hold it. His name
was Tatanka Yotanka, the Sitting Bull. (loc.
1120)
Kindle Details...
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee at present sells for
$10.99
at Amazon, but I’ve seen it discounted several times over the last couple of
years. Amazon offers about a dozen other
Dee Brown e-books - some fiction, some non-fiction, all historical tales set either in the Wild West or the Civil War - and in the
$5.99-$10.99
price range. Alternatively, you can get
BMH@WK bundled with two other of Dee
Brown’s Native American-themed books, Creek Mary’s
Blood and The Fetterman Massacre, for
$23.99.
I shall not be there. I
shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at
Wounded Knee (Stephen Vincent Benet). (loc
116)
I
don’t have any quibbles about Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The worst I can say is that the chapters
sometimes felt repetitive, but that was due to the US army having only one way
to deal with the Indians, which was:
a.) greet
them,
b.) offer to buy their land,
c.)
make them sign some sort of treaty, written in English,
d.)
change the treaty when back in Washington,
e.) tell them to move to a barren reservation, or be killed.
The
Indians knew they were outnumbered, out-gunned, out-industrialized, and about
to be starved to death, no matter what choices they made. When a hunter-gatherer society encounters an
agrarian/industrial society, the latter inevitably annihilates the former. The outcome here was inevitable; all parties
knew it. But we whites didn't have to be
so brutal about it.
A couple bonus excerpts, to show what the Indians were up against:
In 1860 there were probably 300,000 Indians
in the United States and Territories, most of them living west of the
Mississippi. According to varying
estimates, their numbers had been reduced by one-half to two-thirds since the
arrival of the first settlers in Virginia and New England. The survivors were now pressed between
expanding white populations on the East and along the Pacific coasts – more
than thirty million Europeans and their descendants. (loc. 247)
Of the 3,700,000 buffalo destroyed from 1872 through
1874, only 150,000 were killed by Indians. (loc. 4101)
9½ Stars.
In 1972, one of my college dorm-mates
was from the San Carlos Apache Indian reservation, which gets mentioned in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. IIRC, we made a couple visits there over the
course of the year, and the two things I remember were: a.) the warm hospitality
we long-haired white students were given, and b.) the abject poverty of some of the Apaches, including an elderly woman who lived in what
was little more than an outside guest room with branches for a roof.
I
think sometimes the casinos are the Great Spirit’s revenge for what America has done to the Indian nations.
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