Initially Dee Brown's recounting (superbly researched and nuanced in its detail) reads a bit like a listing of battles and forced Indian migrations. But somewhere along the way, as the reader begins to more fully appreciated how all the stories of the tribes tie together, as names like Spotted Tail and Big Foot float along the periphery of different tribes struggles, only to be quickly snuffed out in waves of violence, one begins to feel the enormity and the depth of the losses suffered. Yet Brown walks a fine line by not simply casting the Indian peoples as lambs blindly led to the slaughter. Stories of Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, Ten Bears and Satanta (among many others) show complex men trying to deal with a world melting under their very feet and attempting to protect the lives and spirits of their people. As warriors, leaders, and diplomats, these men did all that was within their power to try and carve out a small corner of a vast land they once inhabited and live alongside the onslaught of white settlers and soldiers. The eventual reasons for their defeat are numerous and unique to each tribe, but binding these stories together is the total subversion of the American government to land and resource greed and what would finally be the inability of the Indians to reconcile white intentions with their own concepts of the good. When it was all said and done one is left with the impression that Indians could only fathom the depths to which whites were willing to break their word and ignore their treaties when it was all but too late. Sitting Bull saw it, and Red Cloud came to understand, but by then even the reservations were being carved up and the Dakotas being transferred to whites who, less than a decade earlier, relinquished all claims to what was seen as a useless land.
There is no silver lining here, no reason for hope or celebration at the genocide of the American Indians. It is forever a part of the American legacy to inhabit a stolen land. It is fitting that Brown's recounting ends at the Massacre at Wounded Knee. There, one of the last of the plains chiefs, Big Foot, an aging man dying of pneumonia, was gunned down by white soldiers with as many as three hundred of his followers, all of whom were left to freeze into twisted corpses in the coming blizzard.
