Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

I came to this book the way most people do, late and slightly suspicious. A friend kept saying that if you wanted to understand the American West, read it, and I kept nodding and then reading something else. When I finally did, the first thing I noticed was that the book opens with a question that has no comfortable answer. "Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket," Brown asks on his first page, and then he spends 487 pages showing you what happened to them and to everyone who came after. The book appeared in 1970 from Holt, Rinehart & Winston, ISBN 9780030853227, and it has never been out of print. Nearly four million copies, seventeen languages, more than a year on the bestseller list in hardcover. It is also the reason a lot of people who grew up on Westerns now feel oddly sheepish about them.

A survey first, then one war at a time

Brown's method is easy to miss if you only know the famous title. He does not start with a battle. He starts with a survey. The opening chapter, "Their Manners Are Decorous and Praiseworthy," runs from 1492 to 1860 and sets the terms: the early meeting between Native peoples and Europeans was mostly peaceful, the trade goods and the horse and the guns began to reshape life on the Plains, and open resistance only hardened once land was being taken and the eastern nations had already been shoved west by war, removal and broken treaty. The chapter ends in 1860 with the Plains about to go up in fire.

After that, the book works campaign by campaign. The table of contents in this edition runs to nineteen chapters, and under each chapter heading Brown lists numbered entries, forty-nine of them in all, the way a historian with something to prove builds a case rather than a story. Chapter by chapter the cast changes: the Navahos, the Apaches led by Cochise, the Cheyennes and Arapahos, the Santee Dakota, the Lakota, the Poncas, the Modocs, the Utes, the Nez Perce, the Kiowa and Comanche, and the handful of others the great armies of the settlement era crushed on the way to filling the map. By the time the last chapter puts an old Red Cloud in his last years, the reader has been through about thirty years of war with very little page break.

I found that method both the book's strength and its problem. The strength is that Brown lets a campaign breathe. When he gets to the Navahos, we live with Manuelito, a leader who would not surrender, who walked his people away from their homeland rather than sign away what they had.

The Long Walk of the Navahos

Chapter Two is "The Long Walk of the Navahos," and it is the one I remember. Brown sets it in 1860, when the Navahos were still resisting from their strongholds in the canyons. In February of that year, Brown writes, Manuelito led five hundred warriors against an Army horse herd, and the soldiers began answering by attacking bands rather than villages. The treaty of 1864 changed the arithmetic. The government offered rations and land in exchange for the Navahos going to Bosque Redondo, a new reservation in New Mexico. Then Carleton came, and the offer turned into an order.

The roundup is the ugliest passage in the book to read. Families were cut off from their food, kept moving in winter, and the count of dead in transit grows in Brown's account. His numbers are the kind you can check. The first contingent of 1,430 reached Fort Sumner on March 13. Ten died on the road. Three children were kidnapped, he reports, probably by Mexicans riding with the soldier escort. A later group of about 946 came in, and about 110 of those died.

Brown does not editorialize at that moment. He lets the arithmetic speak and then shows the reservation that was supposed to be a gift. The soil was alkaline and unpromising, and the water was black and brackish, the Navahos said. They stayed four years and then walked back. That decision to leave a promised reservation and go home is the part of the story I have never forgotten, because Brown lets a people make a decision instead of only receiving one.

Cochise, Fetterman, and the reports that went wrong

Other chapters are built the same way, out of a specific place and a specific quarrel. The Apache chapters cover the old war chief Mangas Colorado, called Red Sleeves, a Mimbreño of about seventy who was said to be even taller than Cochise, and then Cochise himself, whom the government invited to Washington and whom no white man could find until the spring of 1871. When Lieutenant Bascom had him arrested in 1871, the uneasy peace in the Apache country collapsed. Brown quotes Cochise on what he would do to Crook, the commander he called the Gray Wolf. He would fight with rocks if he had to, and if God willed it, the rocks would fall on Cochise and cover him up.

Brown is at his best when the paperwork and the memory disagree, because then you can see the two versions of the West. The Army reported a fight at a village as "the attack on Crazy Horse's village," when Crazy Horse was camped miles away to the northeast and the men who were attacked were Two Moon's and the others. He also gives the Fetterman fight its Indian name, the Battle of the Hundred Slain, and notes the aftermath: almost two hundred dead and wounded, and the survivors turning back with the wounded because of the cold. He then points out the obvious, that this was the worst defeat the Army had yet suffered in Indian warfare.

The same care runs through the method notes. Brown explains in his preface that the real sources of Native testimony are the records of treaty councils and the other formal meetings where Indians and officials sat down together, and that he interviewed warriors and chiefs and gave them the chance to explain what was happening to them. He is also honest that the quality of those interviews varied with the abilities of the interpreters, which is a warning most popular history books do not print. The back matter carries a bibliography with real citations in it, an interview with Cochise held by the Kansas State Historical Society, Senate report 156, and a Westernlore edition of the Long Walk published in Los Angeles in 1964. You can audit him. That matters more than it sounds.

The end of the war and the argument about it

The last chapters move to the reservation and allotment era, the years when the buffalo herds were fenced off and the pressure was applied to the last armed resistance. Standing Bear, Little Wolf, Ouray, Colorow, the Chiricahua prisoners at Fort Pickens, Geronimo, Victorio, Nana, and then Wovoka, the Paiute prophet whose ghost dance panicked the country, and Big Foot's death. The book does not end in a victory parade. It ends with old Red Cloud.

The reception was enormous and mostly warm. Time ran a piece called "The Forked-Tongue Syndrome" in February 1971 and compared Brown to an auditor going through old forgotten records, tallying broken promises and massacres. N. Scott Momaday, who had won a Pulitzer by then, wrote in the New York Times that the book's documentation of council records and firsthand description was extraordinary, and called the whole thing a narrative of singular integrity. Peter Farb weighed in the New York Review of Books in December 1971 and said the Indian wars were finally shown to be the dirty murders they were. The book became a movie in 2007 on HBO, and a new preface by Brown appeared for the thirtieth anniversary edition, with a foreword by Hampton Sides in the 2007 Henry Holt printing. It has been reissued ever since.

The criticism is real, and some of it lands. Francis Paul Prucha, reviewing the book in the American Historical Review in 1972, argued that much of the material went uncited except for direct quotations, that the selection of episodes served a particular point of view rather than balance, and that the story of government and Indian was told without enough of the country's other history around it. More recently the historian Ari Kelman argued in Myth America that a book intended to document a vibrant Native past actually reduced Indigenous history to decline, destruction and disappearance, which is the vanishing Indian story with a white man's name on it.

There is a related objection that is really about form, and it is the one I keep running into as a reader. Brown gives a dozen separate peoples one narrative voice and one rhythm, and the compression does real damage. The Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Apache, the Diné and the Ute did not experience the same war or the same empire, and when they all speak in the same register, quietly and with the same rhythm of grief, they start to blend. Brown also dramatizes. He builds scenes, and sometimes the scene is tidier than the record. The Army's "attack on Crazy Horse's village" is a good example of the reverse case, where the official report is the exaggeration and Brown has to fight his own source.

Then there is the harder question of who gets to narrate. Brown said he wanted the history of the settlement of the West read from the point of view of its victims, and that Americans who always looked westward should read the book facing eastward. It is an extraordinary thing for a white librarian from the South to have done, and the book deserves its four million readers. But the voice that carries the victories and the deaths is still one man's. David Treuer, who is Ojibwe on his mother's side and grew up on a reservation, felt the weight of that and answered it with The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee in 2019, a book written about Indian life rather than Indian death. Neither book cancels the other. They sit on the same table, and the argument between them is the argument the first one started.

The man who wrote it

Brown was born on Leap Year Day in 1908 in a sawmill town in Louisiana and grew up in the oil boom country of Ouachita County, Arkansas. As a boy he read a three-volume history of the Lewis and Clark expedition in the Little Rock public library and never quite came back from it. At Little Rock high school games he got to know Moses Yellowhorse, a pitcher for the Travelers, and Brown said later that the friendship shaped his view of the West and his writing. He worked for the Department of Agriculture as a librarian from 1934, spent the war in the War Department library, and then became an agriculture librarian at the University of Illinois, where he stayed from 1948 to 1972 and where he was still head librarian when Time called him a Western historian. He was part of a generation of archivists who had read everything, and when he sat down to write about the Plains, he had the notes to do it.

A lot of what he wrote before was built the same way. Fighting Indians of the West and Trail Driving Days with Martin Schmitt, The Fetterman Massacre, Showdown at Little Big Horn, and then the one that made his name. He kept writing afterwards, and readers often assumed he was Native American, which he was not. He was a white man from Arkansas, and the book is clearer for it.

Who should read it

Read it if you want the version of the West that starts with the land already inhabited, and if you are willing to be told that the story you were handed as a child had a side that had been cut out. It is short, it is readable, and it will make you angry in a slow way that lasts longer than you expect.

Read something else if you want tribal histories written by tribal historians, or if you want the disagreements left visible. Brown gives you a synthesis, and the synthesis is the point as well as the limit. Ari Kelman, David Treuer and the historians who followed them are not correcting trivia. They are asking whether a nation that has been on the receiving end of a rewritten history for half a century should write the next version itself.

The 2007 HBO film with Adam Beach and Aidan Quinn covers roughly the last two chapters, the Lakota road to Wounded Knee. It is worth seeing, and it is not the book. The book is nineteen chapters long, and the first seventeen of them are the ones that keep the last two from being a tragedy with a happy ending.

I still think about the first page. "Where today are the Pequot?" Brown asks, and a century and a half later the question is the one we still have to answer. He answered it as well as anyone could in 1970, and he left the sources in the back of the book so that the next person could do better.