The true American West

Hampton Sides
BLOOD AND THUNDER
An epic of the American West
480pp. Little, Brown. £20.
9780316027458
US: Doubleday. $26.95. 978 0 385 50777 6
 
Kingsley M. Bray
CRAZY HORSE
A Lakota life
528pp. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. $34.95.
978 0 8061 3785 8.
 
Ned Blackhawk
VIOLENCE OVER THE LAND
Indians and empires in the early American west
344pp. Harvard University Press. £22.95 (US $35).
978 0 674 02290 4
 
Although there is some overlap of time and place in these three books, especially in those by Ned Blackhawk and Hampton Sides, that is not what mainly connects them. Their common theme is the viol- ence unleashed on Indian peoples by European and American colonization. Blackhawk writes that violence is the “overarching theme” and pain the “implied object” in his study of the impact of colonization on the Indians of the Great Basin; violence is also intrinsic to Sides’s account of the American resettlement of the south-western United States, as well as (how could it be otherwise?) to Kingsley M. Bray’s biography of Crazy Horse, the greatest of all Lakota warriors. There is enough violence in these three books of– murders, rapes, slavery, scalpings, massacres and environmental destruction – to make Cormac McCarthy blanch.

Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder is in some ways a throwback to the type of sweeping Western history that was written by the likes of Bernard DeVoto and David Lavender, histories densely populated by colourful characters, panoramas of the American conquest of the West. At first, it seems as if Sides (who is editor-in-chief of Outside magazine, and the author of the prizewinning Ghost Soldier, 2001) has also adopted some of the discredited conventions of this earlier writing, when terms like “halfbreed” and “squaw” creep into his text. But to dwell on this would be to do Sides a disservice, because, following the practice of the “New Western History”, he populates his story not just with white Americans, but also with diverse Indian peoples and Mexicans. And he does so with balance and sensitivity: there are noble and venal representatives of each group in this “epic tale of shame and glory”. The period covered is roughly from the 1820s to the 60s, the central location is the Upper Rio Grande valley from Santa Fe to Taos, and the hero of the story is Kit Carson, “field agent of Manifest Destiny”. Sides takes Carson from his unwilling apprenticeship as a saddler in 1820s Missouri, through his famed years as a Rocky Mountain trapper, to his heroic role as a guide on John C. Fremont’s western explorations, to his relatively quiet life as a family man and Indian agent for the Utes in the 1850s, to his stellar service as a Brigadier General in the Union Army, and finally, not long before an aortic aneurysm burst in his chest, killing him at the age of fifty-nine, to his direction of the scorched earth campaign that drove the Navajos from their homeland to the death camp of Bosque Redondo in 1863–4. Sides presents Carson as a brave and honourable man, but one who was capable of committing atrocities if ordered to do so; and he was often ordered to do so.

Revolving around Carson, Sides’s story reaches out to include a dizzying array of characters. His division of the narrative into forty-six short chapters allows him to pull this off, because each turn away from Carson is only a brief diversion. There is Narbona, the wise and pragmatic diplomatic leader of the Navajos, already in his eighties when the army of General Stephen Watts Kearny marched into New Mexico in 1846. There is a host of American military commanders of varying capabilities, none worse than John Milton Chivington, the “Fighting Parson”, who left Sand Creek stained with the blood of innocent Cheyennes in 1864. And there is the dour and driven President James Polk, a tireless expansionist who seized one-third of a continent for the United States. The detailed portrayals of such individuals are a highlight of Blood and Thunder, and it all adds up to a gripping account. As you read it, you can see it as an epic movie, as, apparently, did Steven Spielberg, who has already acquired the rights for Dreamworks.

The historical record is filled with references to Kit Carson, because, Zelig-like, he was present at many of the crucial turning points in the colonization of the American West. Crazy Horse, on the other hand, is barely a shadow in the record. That is probably why Mari Sandoz chose to write her classic biography, Crazy Horse: The strange man of the Ogalalas (1944), as a combination of fiction and well-researched history. Now Kingsley Bray, a freelance historian and Senior Bookseller at BMA Hammicks Medical Bookstore in Manchester, offers “a life of Crazy Horse grounded in the reality of the nineteenth-century Lakota world”. That is quite an ambition: whose reality does he mean? After all, there were 10,500 Lakotas in 1840 and, as Bray’s account reveals, the “latenineteenth-century Lakota world” was deeply fragmented. Still, drawing from his impressive knowledge of that world, Bray is able to fill the blank spaces in the life of Crazy Horse.

Crazy Horse was born in 1840 and given the name Curly Hair. He would later adopt the name that his father, an important Ogalala holy man, had received in a vision. Even as a boy, Crazy Horse was an enigma: withdrawn, silent, thoughtful. Bray argues that this personality was the result of his mother’s suicide, when Crazy Horse was young. He went on his first bison hunt when he was ten or eleven, undertook his vision quest at Scotts Bluff (in western Nebraska) when he was fifteen, killed for the first time (a Winnebago woman) when he was seventeen, and by 1868 was renowned for his courage and intelligence on the battlefield. As the Crows, inveterate enemies of the Lakotas, explained: “We know Crazy Horse better than we do other Sioux. Whenever we have a fight, he is closer to us than he is to you”. After 1863, as the Bozeman Trail was pioneered through Lakota lands, Americans displaced the Crows as the Lakotas’ main enemy. It was an escalating conflict, from the Fetterman Fight in 1868 to the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. Crazy Horse distinguished himself in all of this bloody strife. His method was to engage the enemy in mobile war, isolating units before striking in a succession of localized actions. By using such methods, Bray argues, Crazy Horse was the decisive tactician in General Custer’s defeat.

But even Crazy Horse was forced to acknowledge that his way of life was rapidly fading. By 1875, there were more miners in the Black Hills (all illegal) than there were members of the Lakota nation. With the completion of the Union Pacific railroad in 1869, mobilization of troops into Lakota territory was more easily accomplished, and the troops were better armed than the Lakotas. The bison herds melted away like snow in the spring, bringing starvation to Lakota lodges.

There were few options left for Crazy Horse and his Lakotas. They could flee to Canada, as Sitting Bull did, or move to Indian agencies, the path followed by Spotted Tail and Red Cloud. Crazy Horse was one of the last to resist, fighting for his beloved Powder River country. But even he capitulated, banking on the promise that the United States would establish a reservation for his people in the northern reaches of the homeland. Amid escalating strife among the different bands of the Lakotas, Crazy Horse was arrested and taken to Camp Robinson (in north-western Nebraska) on September 5, 1877. As feuding Lakotas milled around the guardhouse, Crazy Horse tried to escape and was bayoneted by an American soldier. He died soon afterwards. Fort Robinson, as it is now called, set at the foot of majestic pine-topped hills, still seems to be a sombre place, with the weight of its tragic past hanging heavy in the air.

Ned Blackhawk, Associate Professor of History and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, opens his book with a grisly scene that anticipates the violence that follows. In the window of the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe, the locus of colonial power in New Mexico, was hung a “macabre decoration”, a necklace of dried ears that had been cut from nameless indigenous peoples to serve as a reminder of Spanish intolerance of any opposition. Blackhawk follows the “cycles of violence” that were set in motion by Spanish colonization and continued by Mexico and the United States, affecting first the Utes of Colorado and New Mexico, then reaching deeper into the arid recesses of the Great Basin to the Paiute and, finally, the Western Shoshone, Blackhawk’s own people. It is a repeating story of impoverishment, foreclosure of options, and violent resistance. Blackhawk’s achievement is greater than that of Sides or Bray because he is not just rephrasing what is already known, but actually filling a void in historical knowledge by restoring previously overlooked peoples to the record.

Blackhawk makes it clear that by the time that substantial numbers of American settlers arrived on the scene (as opposed to the relatively few American explorers and trappers), Great Basin Indian societies and the environments that had sustained them were already devastated. Much of the damage was done by other Indians, especially the equestrian Utes, who adapted to colonization by capitalizing on their relations with the Spanish, Mexicans and Americans. They were the main slave traders, delivering Southern Paiute and Western Shoshone women and children to trade fairs held in towns like Abiquiu, New Mexico, where the women were subjected to ritualized public rape. By the 1840s, the Utes, again adapting to the circumstances, would publicly torture the children they had stolen from the Paiute, so that sympathetic Mormons would rescue them for a higher price. None of these Indian societies was passive as they dealt with the new realities of European and American control: they were active agents in the settlement, or more accurately, the unsettlement of the West, but not in conditions of their own making. Blackhawk claims that American history has “failed to reckon with the violence upon which the continent was built”, which surely is a more accurate statement for twenty years ago than for today. Nevertheless, no other Western historian has exposed that violence as starkly as he has.

In terms of narrative style, Ned Blackhawk stands apart from the other two authors. His book owes much to the dissertation that it once was, which means, on the debit side, knots of repetition in order to push the violence thesis and, to his credit, close adherence to scrupulously gathered evidence. Hampton Sides’s and Kingsley Bray’s books are well researched too, but their rhetoric is far more expansive, leaving the reader to wonder where historical inference ends and where historical conjecture begins.

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David Wishart is an Historical Geogrpaher who is Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Geography at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His most recent book is the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians, published this year.