My copy of the powerful book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown, sits beside me now, dog-eared to death, pages
browned with time and coffee spills. Dates and names highlighted including such
beautiful and poetic terms as Time of the Big Leaves, Yellow Leaves Moon, and
Moon When the Chokecherries are Ripe. This American classic from 1970, subtitled "An Indian History of the American West, was described by the Washington Post, "not how the West was won, but how it was lost."
Such beauty aside, this is not a book for the faint-hearted.
There are chapters I can’t bear to re-read, and many of today’s words have been
hard to write. But since we at Sweethearts of the West, whether authors,
readers, guests and commenters, love the American West, this book is not to be
missed. The title comes from the last “Indian War” in December 1890, against Minneconjou
(Sioux) chief Big Foot at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, in The Moon When the Deer
Shed. (This “battle” deserves its own blog post sometime.)
The TV and movie Westerns of my childhood often presented
Indians as bloodcurdling enemies out to massacre innocent settlers. The
occasional good “brave” was a mono-syllabic caricature, often a doofus. No American history class I’d ever taken
explained the truth about “Manifest Destiny.” Maybe because we couldn’t handle it. Brown’s
book documents America’s westward expansion through the eyes and words of the
great chiefs, vividly explaining four hundred years of injustice, broken
treaties, and betrayal.
I hope things are different in classrooms now. During my career teaching American Lit, I spent a whole unit on the history and plight of the Native Americans because no teacher or
prof ever told me the complete truth about, say, Christopher “Kit” Carson
(1809-1868). His expeditions through the Rockies made him a national hero, and
his first two wives were Indian. Yet in 1864, he relentlessly hunted down a
group of Navajo. Not content with destroying their hogans (homes) and livestock,
he chopped down their carefully tended grove of peach trees.
No one ever told me about the horrors of Sand Creek. Or of
the Cavalry at Fort Robinson sending good-will blankets to the Oglala Sioux--—blankets
infected with smallpox.
Or of Palo Duro Canyon, The Place of Chinaberry Trees. Only
a few white men knew of this well-hidden canyon in the late summer of 1874. Without
fear and stocked with food to last until spring, Kiowa, Comanche and Cheyenne
sought sanctuary from the whites. Almost two thousand horses shared rich grass
with the buffalo. On September 26, the
Bluecoats descended upon them, the warriors holding off long enough for their women
and children to escape. But by days’ end, General Ranald “Three Fingers” Mackenzie
rounded up the tribes’ treasured horses and had more than a thousand shot to
death. (In a subsequent book, I learned that the horse-loving Cavalry greatly
resisted these orders, and that the slaughter of the terrified beasts took more
than eight hours to complete.)
From the Nez Perce of the Pacific Northwest, I learned their
poignant history in a personal way because my husband’s relatives hail from
this area. I know Paty Jager hails from here, too and her expertise on the Nez
Perce far exceeds mine. But of the many massacres and heart-rending betrayals
in the book, the Nez Perce tragedy really speaks to me.
As with Squanto who helped the Pilgrims in 1620 and the
Taino who treated Christopher Columbus like a god in 1492, the Nez Perce
tribe met the white man in peace. In 1805, the tribe saved the
Lewis and Clark expedition from starvation and dysentery, fed and
welcomed them, and tended their horses for months while
the party explored the Pacific shore. For the next seven decades of friendship,
the Nez Perce proudly declared they had never shed white blood.
Their home turf was Oregon’s Wallowa Valley,
the Valley of Winding Waters. By the 1870’s, simply put, settlers
and gold-seekers wanted the valley. Negotiations failed. In
May 1877, the young Nez Perce peace chief Heinmot Tooyalaket (1840-1904) chose
to lead the tribe to refuge in Canada, the “Grandmother’s Land” (referring to
Queen Victoria), following in the footsteps of Sitting Bull. The whites called
this young chief, Joseph. By all accounts, he was a highly respected peace
chief among Indians and whites alike.
The fleeing Nez Perce consisted of 800: 450 “noncombatants”
and 250 warriors, and 2,000 horses. Outsmarting the U.S. Cavalry for 1,700
miles through the Bitterroot Mountains and Yellowstone country, the Nez Perce journey
has been called the most brilliant retreat in American military history.
Newspaper accounts of the day had Americans cheering them on.
However, the Nez Perce were severely weakened by the capture
of many of their horses. In October, the weary Joseph and his band stopped to
rest only 30 miles from their destination. By that time, U.S.
reinforcements and sharpshooters had arrived. After five days in bitter
snow, Joseph surrendered.
Then he delivered the most quoted of all the great chiefs’
speeches, of which I include a few lines.
“…I am tired of fighting… it is cold and we have no blankets.
The little children are freezing to death. ..I want to have time to look for my
children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I will find them among the
dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where he
sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood, who translated
Joseph’s heart-rending speech, resigned his commission not long after and
became a powerful attorney who fought for the rights of the dispossessed.
When Joseph died September 21, 1905, exiled at
the Colville Reservation in Washington State, his physician
claimed “a broken heart” was the cause of death.
His name, Heinmot Tooyalaket, translates as Thunder Rolling
in the Mountains.
Listen for him. Read this book. Try to keep your eyes dry and
your heart from cracking while you read.
~by Tanya Hanson
My next book, Soul Food, # five in the Hearts Crossing Series, comes out May 4. To start the series and tempt you, I'm giving away a pdf copy today of book one, Hearts Crossing Ranch, to one commenter. Don't forget to leave your e-mail address.
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