| Summary: |
From the moment that Europeans landed on America's shores, they engaged in bloody conflict with the natives they encountered. Tensions and hostilities bred in the colonial wars with the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch would lead inevitably to the later wars of the removal period, skirmishes on the western Plains, and, ultimately, the confrontation at Wounded Knee. Now, captured here in the words of those who lived it, is the epic, violent history of a landscape turned red - through fear, greed, and fatal misunderstanding. Each chapter in this sweeping narrative outlines and focuses on a particular war or period, re-creating its conflicts through hundreds of immediate sources - the diaries and letters of military commanders, captivity narratives and missionary journals, U.S. Army reports and treaties, and Native American speeches and oral accounts. Here are the authentic voices of Chief Joseph, Black Hawk, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse; the accounts given by George Rogers Clark, Kit Carson, William Tecumseh Sherman, and George Armstrong Custer; as well as the experiences of the common soldier who labored under brutal conditions along the frontier, and Native American warriors fighting to the death to preserve their threatened way of life. Additional features make this volume the perfect reference. Included in each chapter are brief biographies of individual native and white leaders; excerpts from hundreds of historical documents; feature boxes on such topics as the conduct of warfare along the frontier, Native American beliefs, the fate of a captive, and treaties that were made and abandoned; maps of tribal locations and battle campaigns; and historical drawings and photographs. A detailed chronology highlights all of the significant events in Native-white relations from the sixteenth-century Spanish exploration of North America through the aftermath of Wounded Knee. Like no other single volume, Chronicle of the Indian Wars brings to life the entire history of this centuries-old struggle for possession of a continent, tracing the sources of tragic conflict from their origin nearly 500 years ago up to the brink of the twentieth century. |
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