Let me first say, Dee Brown's book, BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE is a well written classic that flows nicely. It contains great structure and is a pleasure to read. Certainly no right thinking person would disagree that the American Indians were used and abused by the government at every turn. The treaties the Indians signed were more often than not, not worth the paper they were written on. Murderous cowards like Chivington betrayed those who declared themselves peaceful and friends of the whites, like Black Kettle and the Cheyenne atrocity at Sand Creek. While still under British rule, Indians of the Ohio Valley were victims of one of the first instances of bio-terrorism when the British knowingly and deliberately infected them with small pox.
So while it is safe to say the sentiment of Brown's book is clearly accurate and justified, for the overall scope of the book, exception must be taken by anyone seeking the cold hard truth. Since Brown's book was published, and quickly popularized, most historians have followed Brown's approach to viewing the Indian wars of the American West from a strictly ethnocentric viewpoint. To them, the term "Indian wars" has come to mean only "Indian - White wars", fought primarily to interrupt the flow of the expansion of white settlement. Paul Wellman began this trend in 1934 with his publication of the account of the 1862 Minnesota Massacre, DEATH ON THE PRARIE. However, what Wellman began, Brown perfected, until we have now reach, in this country, where the history of the American Indian is involved, a sort of Zinnian approach (a phrase I coined myself after revisionist historian Howard Zinn) to the re-writing or revision of American history, in this case specifically, the history of the American West.
I come to this conclusion for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is Brown's subtitle, "An Indian History of the American West". If that is, indeed, what he is seeking to fully examine, then Brown ignores the fact that Indians of different tribes held very different views of that history. He sought to interpret the Indian wars of the northern plains only as "Indian-white" wars and described them only from the viewpoint of the Sioux hostiles. Brown brushes off as "mercenaries" those tribes that became allies to the whites against the Sioux.
To view the Crow (who white trappers and traders had predicted in the 1830's would soon be extinct due to their far more numerous red enemies) and the Arikara (who also lost their land to the Sioux) as white "mercenaries" is far beyond simplistic reasoning and completely overlooks the long history of Indian warfare in the region. The Crow, Arikara and many other tribes had been fighting the Sioux (and losing, for the most part) for generations before they received any effective aid from the whites. Brown is shortsighted in his work to attempt to lend understanding of the plight of the Indian without an awareness of the history of intertribal warfare.
The Sioux migrated south and west to the Missouri around 1750. In the century preceding and following that movement, the Sioux engaged in war with at least twenty-six other Indian tribes, as well as the River Metis and the U.S. Army. Brown also fails to note that the most dramatic battles fought between the army and the Sioux were on lands the Sioux had taken from other tribes since 1851. Also overlooked is that the Arikara and Hidatsa chiefs who had signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 had both been killed by the Sioux when in 1864, the Arakara Chief White Shield petitioned the army to uphold its treaty and punish the Sioux.
Brown's book, as I said earlier, is well written, and parts of it are quite accurate. However, portraying history from only one viewpoint is shortsighted and often has dangerous consequences. Such is the case here. Brown's book has been accepted as gospel and has since led the way to even further revision of the truth.
Monty Rainey
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