In their own words, they reveal how the government repeatedly violated treaties and instigated violent conflicts with tribe members who played no part in attacks against whites.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was the first historical account of the expansion of the American West to be told from an American Indian point of view. It is not, however, a one-sided account. Brown relies on facts to reconstruct the events he describes, which are seldom as clear-cut as some would like to believe. In many cases, he tells of senseless killings of settlers by American Indian warriors, including the Santee slaughter of traders and soldiers near Fort Ridgely in 1862 and the killing of hated government agent Nathan Meeker and his white workmen on a Ute reservation in 1879. Brown also tells of white men such as General William Tecumseh Sherman and General George Crook who, despite spending many years battling Indians across the West, also fought bravely for the reasonable treatment of tribes like the Navahos and the Poncas.
Far from being a comprehensive history of relations between whites and American Indians, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee focuses on the thirty-year period from 1860 to 1890, often referred to as the final three decades of the "Indian Wars." Each chapter of the book is devoted to the ongoing saga of a different tribe or group of tribes.
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