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So while it is safe to say the
sentiment of Brown's book is clearly accurate and
justified, for the overall scope of the book, exception
must be taken by anyone seeking the cold hard truth. Since
Brown's book was published, and quickly popularized, most
historians have followed Brown's approach to viewing the
Indian wars of the American West from a strictly
ethnocentric viewpoint. To them, the term "Indian
wars" has come to mean only "Indian - White
wars", fought primarily to interrupt the flow of the
expansion of white settlement. Paul Wellman began this
trend in 1934 with his publication of the account of the
1862 Minnesota Massacre, DEATH ON THE PRARIE. However,
what Wellman began, Brown perfected, until we have now
reach, in this country, where the history of the American
Indian is involved, a sort of Zinnian approach (a phrase I
coined myself after revisionist historian Howard Zinn) to
the re-writing or revision of American history, in this
case specifically, the history of the American West.
I come to this conclusion for a variety of reasons, not
the least of which is Brown's subtitle, "An Indian
History of the American West". If that is, indeed,
what he is seeking to fully examine, then Brown ignores
the fact that Indians of different tribes held very
different views of that history. He sought to interpret
the Indian wars of the northern plains only as
"Indian-white" wars and described them only from
the viewpoint of the Sioux hostiles. Brown brushes off as
"mercenaries" those tribes that became allies to
the whites against the Sioux.
To view the Crow (who white trappers and traders had
predicted in the 1830's would soon be extinct due to their
far more numerous red enemies) and the Arikara (who also
lost their land to the Sioux) as white
"mercenaries" is far beyond simplistic reasoning
and completely overlooks the long history of Indian
warfare in the region. The Crow, Arikara and many other
tribes had been fighting the Sioux (and losing, for the
most part) for generations before they received any
effective aid from the whites. Brown is shortsighted in
his work to attempt to lend understanding of the plight of
the Indian without an awareness of the history of
intertribal warfare.
The Sioux migrated south and west to the Missouri around
1750. In the century preceding and following that
movement, the Sioux engaged in war with at least
twenty-six other Indian tribes, as well as the River Metis
and the U.S. Army. Brown also fails to note that the most
dramatic battles fought between the army and the Sioux
were on lands the Sioux had taken from other tribes since
1851. Also overlooked is that the Arikara and Hidatsa
chiefs who had signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 had
both been killed by the Sioux when in 1864, the Arakara
Chief White Shield petitioned the army to uphold its
treaty and punish the Sioux.
Brown's book, as I said earlier, is well written, and
parts of it are quite accurate. However, portraying
history from only one viewpoint is shortsighted and often
has dangerous consequences. Such is the case here. Brown's
book has been accepted as gospel and has since led the way
to even further revision of the truth.
Monty Rainey
www.juntosociety.com
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