Customer Reviews

The Indians (The Old West)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This series is visually and tactilely elegant. Leather cover, slick pages, multitudinous artistic renderings of the time, photographs as available (the photos of selected Indians on pages 7-13 are powerful images), maps, and so on. This series also does a pretty good job of tackling its various subjects, from the cavalry to frontiersmen, to pioneers to women of the time to. . . . The focus here is Indians. The coverage is rather sensitive and is not undercut by stereotypes or condescension.

The book begins with a great peace council in 1840 among four major tribes--Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa. These groups had long fought with one another. At the council, they pledged peace among one another. The book notes that 1840 was something of a signal year in the Indians of the Old West. Settlers had begun traversing the West as they looked to settle even further west; the old trapping business began to close down. The total Indian population in the West was 300,000, a very small number to contend with the ensuing movement west of so many from the eastern United States.

A map on page 33 shows, as of 1840, where the significant tribes lived--Sauk and Fox and Eastern Sioux in what is now Iowa and Minnesota to the Delaware and Kansas in what is now Kansas/Nebraska to Apache in Arizona, etc.

The second chapter discusses the life of Indians within horses, important resources for the nomadic tribes. The history of acquiring horses is discussed (and see the map on page 51 showing the pattern by which horses spread on the continent) as the key role they played in the lives of tribes. Buffalo and their role in Indian life are also considered here. Chapter 3 inquires into the life of Indians in the Old West, including housing (tipi, for instance), cooking, clothing. The role of women is addressed as well. Other chapters examine religion, the invasion of whites, and the end of Indian power on the plains.

This is another solid entry in the Old West series, from Time-Life Books.