This is a history of “the Indian Wars for the American West,” so nothing is said about earlier Indian wars, either with the Spanish in the southern part of what is now the United States, or colonial conflicts with the Eastern tribes such as the Five Nations. Cozzens’s writing is crisp, clear, and to the point, so although the book is fairly long, the reader never feels like the narrative drags-perhaps, in part, because the reader knows that around the next corner is another tragedy. It contains excellent maps that are a great help to the reader, both in understanding the geography of the land and the geography of Indian tribes. The book is chronologically organized, and within the chronology, focuses on a variety of tribes, some better known than others because of their role in past and present popular culture, from Custer’s Last Stand to Dances With Wolves. This military history covers the period from 1866, beginning with Red Cloud’s War in Montana Territory, until 1891, the final suppression of the Sioux as an independent nation. state-new, perhaps, in Sumer, but not new in 1870.Ĭozzens is a well-known expert on American warfare of the Civil War period. Here is no morality tale, but the old and inevitable tale of nomad vs.
The white man (and the Mexican, and the white man’s numerous Indian allies) usually breaks treaties and sometimes kills women and children. The Sioux are expelled from their land-which they conquered only ten years before by slaughtering the previous inhabitants with extreme brutality. Here, Team Indian does good and bad, and Team White does good and bad, each according to its own internal dictates of morality and external dictates of practicality and need. Of course, given the historiography of the past fifty years, an even-handed look necessarily inverts the traditional narrative. The Earth Is Weeping offers an almost painfully even-handed look at the conflicts between the United States and American Indian tribes after the Civil War.
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