Search Results: Native Americana from I Cannot Live Without Books

Cheyenne Summer: The Battle of Beecher Island -- A History by Terry Mort
In September 1868, the undermanned United States Army was struggling to address attacks by Cheyenne and Sioux warriors against the Kansas settlements, the stagecoach routes, and the transcontinental railroad. General Sheridan hired fifty frontiersmen and scouts to supplement the limited forces at his disposal. He placed them under the command of Major George Forsyth and Lieutenant Frederick Beecher. Their orders were to find the Cheyenne raiders and attack them.
The scouts left Fort Wallace, the westernmost post in Kansas, and headed northwest into Colorado. After a week of fruitless searching and with their supplies almost exhausted, they camped along the narrow Arikaree Fork of the Republican River. In the early morning, they were attacked by a force of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors. The scouts retreated to a small, sandy island in the shallow river and dug in. Eventually, they were surrounded by as many as six hundred warriors,… Read More

Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America by Nicole Eustace
On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 17622, two white fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. Though virtually forgotten today, this act of brutality set in motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America.
In Covered with Night, leading historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, bringing us into the overlapping worlds of European colonists and Indigenous peoples in this formative period. As she shows, the murder of the Indigenous man set the entire mid-Atlantic on edge, with many believing war was imminent. Isolated killings often flared into colonial wars in North America, and colonists now anticipated a vengeful Indigenous uprising. Frantic efforts to resolve… Read More

The Last Campaign: Sherman, Geronimo, and the War for America by H.W. Brands
In its history, the United States government fought many battles for control of the American continent, the longest being its war against the Native American tribes. In the years after the Civil War, when the construction of the transcontinental railroads made a unified nation a real possibility, pressure built on the government to deal with the tribes once and for all. In The Last Campaign, master storyteller H.W. Brands uses his dramatic, character-driven style to relate the climax of this epic clash through the lives of the men who epitomized the values of the opposing sides.
William Tecumseh Sherman served in the U.S. Army for decades, helping evict the Seminoles from their home in Florida and bearing witness to the Gold Rush that fueled the peopling of California. In Brand's memorable portrayal, he is a man who experiences personal anguish but is outwardly stoic. During the Civil War, he begged President Lincoln not to… Read More

The Red Man's Bones: George Catlin, Artist and Showman by Benita Eisler
THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES.
George Catlin (1796 - 1872) has been called the "first artist of the West," as none before him lived among and painted the Native American tribes of the Northern Plains. After a false start as a painter of miniatures, Catlin found his calling: to fix the image of a "vanishing race" before their "extermination" -- his word -- by a government greedy for their lands. In the first six years of the 1830s, he created over six hundred portraits -- unforgettable likenesses of individual chiefs, warriors, braves, squaws, and children belonging to more than thirty tribes living along the upper Missouri River.
Political forces thwarted Catlin's ambition to sell what he called his "Indian Gallery" as a national collection, and in 1840 the artist began three decades of self-imposed exile abroad. For a time, his exhibitions and writings made him the most celebrated American… Read More

Tecumseh & Brock: The War of 1812 by James Laxer
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the British Empire is engaged in a titanic war with Napoleonic France for global supremacy. The American Republic is quickly expanding its territory along the western frontier, while native peoples struggle to protect their lands from the relentless wave of new settlers.
Bestselling author and scholar James Laxer offers a fresh and compelling view of this decisive war, by bringing to life two major contests: the native peoples' Endless War to establish nationhood and sovereignty on their traditional territories and the American campaign to settle its grievances with Britain through the conquest of Canada. At the heart of this story is the unlikely friendship and political alliance of Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief and charismatic leader of the native confederacym, and Major General Isaac Brock, defender and protector of the British Crown. Together, these two towering figures secured what would become the nation of… Read More

Thieves' Road: The Black Hills Betrayal and Custer's Path to Little Bighorn by Terry Mort
In the summer of 1874, Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer led an expedition of some one thousand troops and more than one hundred wagons into the Black Hills of South Dakota. This colorful narrative history tells the little-known story of this exploratory mission and reveals how it set the stage for the climactic Battle of the Little Bighorn two years later.
What is the significance of this obscure foray into the Black Hills? The short answer, as author Terry Mort explains, is that Custer found gold. This discovery in the context of the worst economic depression the country had yet experienced spurred a gold rush that brought hordes of white prospectors to the Sioux's sacred grounds. The result was the trampling of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had granted the Black Hills to the Sioux, and the tribe's inevitable retaliation against the white invasion.
At the time of General Custer's exploration… Read More

Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War by Daniel J. Sharfstein
Oliver Otis Howard thought he was a man of destiny. Chosen to lead the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War, the Union Army general was entrusted with the era's most crucial task: helping millions of former slaves claim the rights of citizens. He was energized by the belief that abolition and Reconstruction, the country's great struggles for liberty and equality, were God's plan for himself and the nation. To honor his righteous commitment to a new American freedom, Howard University was named for him.
But as the nation's politics curdled in the 1870s, General Howard exiled himself from Washington, D.C., rejoined the army, and was sent across the continent to command forces in the Pacific Northwest. Shattered by Reconstruction's collapse, he assumed a new mission: forcing Native Americans to become Christian farmers on government reservations.
Howard's plans for redemption in the West ran… Read More

Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America by David J. Silverman
The adoption of firearms by American Indians between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries marked a turning point in the history of North America's indigenous peoples -- a cultural earthquake so profound, says David Silverman, that its impact has yet to be adequately measured. Thundersticks reframes our understanding of Indians' historical relationship with guns, arguing against the notion that they prized these weapons more for the pyrotechnic terror they inspired than for their efficiency as tools of war. Native peoples fully recognized the potential of firearms to assist them in their struggles against colonial forces, and mostly against one another.
The smooth-bore, flintlock musket was Indians' stock firearm, and its destructive potential transformed their lives. For the deer hunters east of the Mississippi, the gun evolved into an essential hunting tool. Most importantly, well-armed tribes were able… Read More

Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War by John W. Hall
In the spring of 1832, when the Indian warrior Black Hawk and a thousand followers marched into Illinois to reoccupy lands earlier ceded to American settlers, the U.S. Army turned to rival tribes for military support. Elements of the Menominee, Dakota, Potawatomi, and Ho Chunk tribes willingly allied themselves with the United States government against their fellow Native Americans in an uncommon defense of their diverse interests. As the Black Hawk war came only two years after the passage of the Indian Removal Act and is widely viewed as a land grab by ravenous settlers, the military participation of these tribes seems bizarre. What explains this alliance.
In order to grasp the Indians' motives, John Hall explores their alliances in earlier wars with colonial powers as well as in intertribal antagonisms and conflicts. In the crisis of 1832, Indians acted as they had traditionally, levering their relationship with a powerful ally… Read More