The Killing of Crazy Horse - Thomas Powers

Sometimes I get on a topic and I can’t remember how I got there. So it is with the conflict between the United States and the plains Indians in the latter half of the 19th century. Usually it’s Wikipedia’s fault, but this particular rabbit hole could have come from anywhere. In this case it led to The Killing of Crazy Horse, which, as the title suggests, uses one incident as a focal point to view a much longer conflict.

Crazy Horse, a fearless Sioux warrior and gifted tactician, features prominently in the book, but more as a symbol than as a man. Part of this is due to his notoriously taciturn nature. Though he commanded much respect among his people, he said little, leaving the sermonizing to more loquacious figures like Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. His words are scarcely recorded, and there isn’t even a known picture of him. The most prominent characters in the book are therefore figures adjacent to Crazy Horse, those who fought with him and, to a greater extent, those who fought against him, notably General Crook and Lieutenant Clark. The marquee role goes to William Garnett, a half-Sioux man who served as an interpreter and had a foot in both worlds. Together, their shared experiences show Crazy Horse in bas relief, carving out the absences to reveal a picture of the man.

Descriptions of the battles are highly clinical, tracing movements with almost pedantic precision in a style common to civil war histories but that I often struggle to follow. Apart from this, the narrative is mostly about relationships, and Powers does a good and even-handed job of showing life on the plains during that period. A good book for those interested in the topic.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder - Caroline Fraser

I didn’t read the Little House books growing up (I was more of a Wayside kid), and the little of the story I know outside of pop culture comes from overhearing snippets my wife read to our daughter. I assume this makes me something of an atypical reader of Prairie Fires. In truth, my interest was mainly in the time and place where the books were set, and I picked up Prairie Fires expecting it to expand on the historical context of the American Frontier. It did do that to an extent, though Laura’s frontier years comprise at most 1/3 of the book. The rest splits in focus between Laura and her daughter Rose. Had I known this going in, I may have been less inclined to begin the book in the first place.

I’m glad I didn’t know it, though, because the Rose Wilder Lane is a fascinating—if infuriating—personality. Though largely forgotten now as anything other than the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Lane was a formidable author in her own right. Prodigious and unscrupulous, she wrote biographies of famous men with only cursory research, leaning in to speculation and outright invention without the slightest shame. Her stories sold to major magazines for alarming sums, yet whatever money she made she got rid of so fast it was almost as if she were allergic to it. Aggressively giving and resentful, her mother’s keeper and dependent, she is a study of contradictions. I’d be surprised if she didn’t have some sort of personality disorder.

Devotees of Little House will likely enjoy the details of how the books were revised, and the symbiotic amalgam of mother and daughter that forged them. I enjoyed it too, though mostly I liked reading about these two very strange, not entirely likeable, but inarguably influential women. Fraser wrote neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job, but painted an honest, thoughtful, unflinching portrait. Her prose is excellent, lightly adorned where useful but not overly florid, rich in detail and context.

I greatly enjoyed this book, and might even pick up some of the Little House books now.

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

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a title I’d always heard without knowing much of its contents. Its connection with American Indians was obvious from context, but whether it was a film or a novel or what I didn’t know. As it happens, the book is a historical chronicling of America’s western expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, told entirely from the perspective of the tribes that were displaced or destroyed. It is a sad book, sympathetically told, and an important one, in that it collects the words and recollections of a people who were rarely allowed t ospeak for themselves—certainly not in as wide a forum.

There is a depressing repetitiveness to the book, which proceeds chronologically forward and, for the most part, geographically westward. In each chapter we meet (or occasionally revisit) a tribe, and watch as the same cycle repeats itself: pressure fro mwhite settlers forces the indians to accept some sort of treaty. The treaty is either a swindle from the outset, or bargained in good faith but reinterpretted later to be more beneficial to the United States government and less to the tribe. Tensions rise until the tribe is corralled into a reservation or goes to war with an enemy it cannot beat. Tactical intelligence sometimes brings brief victories, legal or martial, but the tide is inexorable, and it sweeps always west.

Though unflinching in its portrayal of history, this is not a bitter book. There are good white men who see the Indians as human beings and want to do right by them, and cynical tribes who ally with the American soldiers against other Indians in order to secure better terms for themselves. Yet individual goodness cannot perservere against an unfeeling system, and those who attempt to resist are either worn down into apathy or destroyed. In this sense it reminds me a bit of The Wire, a more modern example of flawed but good people bashing their heads against an unfeeling system in an effort to budge it an inch, and coming away with nothing for their troubles but pain.

Brown’s writing is strong and crisp, capturing some of the poetry of the men for which it speaks. Long passages are sometimes quoted which give particular evidence to the lyrical nature of native tongues, rich in metaphor and anchored closely to the land. I wouldn’t call Bury my Heart a light read, but it is an engaging and important one.