How America lost the west from 1865 to 1890.
Yes, lost it. For the western United States could have been a very different country for today's Americans to admire and fall in love with, and the movies I and my father's generation grew up with would not have centered on the destruction of a native people, or the misinformation of their savagery. After all, it was the Spanish conquistadors who taught Native Americans to scalp other humans. And it was the British of Canada who first paid their indian mercenaries for scalps of any age American in the Revolutionary War.
Dee Brown's book needs no applause from me. He has earned every reviewers praise since first published in 1970. This is, however, not an action novel, though there is plenty of action, tragedy, some comedy and even humor in it. And romance too.
This is a solid book of historical literature, told from the side of those who could not write such a book for themselves. But their voices, where recorded in life, are accurately heard throughout and the book has been ardently praised by members of every tribe in America.
So I close with a quote of Black Elk, Oglala Sioux Shaman, who is speaking in old age from his own lodge which overlooked the Wounded Knee Creek a couple of miles below the site of the 1890 massacre. He went to the site two days after the killing, after a blizzard had frozen the 300 or so bodies of the total 350 mostly women and children encamped under the Seventh Cavalry's cannon and repeating rifles.
"...something else died in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream..."
-Ken
No comments:
Post a Comment