Selling Your Father's Bones
America's 140-Year War against the Nez Perce Tribe
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- 18,99 €
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- 18,99 €
Descrição da editora
Part historical narrative, part travelogue, and part environmental plea, Selling Your Father's Bones recounts one of the most astonishing journeys in the history of the American West.
The year 1877 bore witness to a broken promise. Joseph, chief of the peaceable Nez Perce band who made their home in Oregon's Wallowa Valley, had long sworn to uphold the dying words of his father: "This country holds your father's body. Never sell the bones of your mother and your father."
Yet, as the U.S. government confined the tribe to ever smaller reservations in favor of miners and ranchers in their westward sprawl, the fateful decision of several young Nez Perce warriors to attack the settlers set in motion an exodus from Joseph's ancestral home. For the next eleven weeks, seven hundred Nez Perce men, women, and children traveled 1,700 miles across inhospitable wilderness, engaging the chasing army in six battles and many more skirmishes, as they drove on in search of peace and freedom. Just forty miles from the Canadian border, the tribe survived a calamitous five-day siege until Joseph could no longer bear his people's suffering and surrendered. It is said that when he died, in 1904, the cause was a broken heart.
Populated with the heroes and villains of a classic conflict, Selling Your Father's Bones intercuts the Nez Perce's fight for survival with the author's own travels across this very same terrain, the mountains, forests, badlands, and prairies of modern-day Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. The imposing Bitterroot Mountains, the Lolo Pass (then and now among the toughest mountain crossings on the North American continent), and the great Montana buffalo plains retain their majesty. Yet, as Schofield reveals, ecological vandalism, unthinking corporate policies, and dubious political leadership have wrought scarred landscapes, battered communities, and toxic environments whose realities must be borne by the living descendants of both the Nez Perce warriors and the European settlers. As Schofield walks among the people who now occupy these sacred lands, he sees in the values of the Native American West—love for homeland, for ancestry, and for Mother Nature—a route to their, and our, salvation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This account of the Nez Perc 's trials is a painful tale well told. British journalist Schofield writes a history of this Columbia River Valley tribe down to its present-day remnant, confined to a modest Idaho reservation. Casting a wide net, he also describes white settlement in the northwest, emphasizing its devastation of wildlife, soil, rivers and forests. The Nez Perc 's troubles began in the 1850s when the U.S. began insisting the tribe make room for white settlers. The author recounts 20 years of coercion and broken treaties until, in 1877 the tribe was ordered out of its homeland entirely. In defiance of the ordered confinement to a Christian reservation, Nez Perc leaders led their people on a heroic flight across Idaho and Montana, inflicting humiliating defeats on pursuing soldiers, but ending in a tragic surrender. America evicted the tribe in favor of that legendary frontier icon, the homesteader, but, ironically, the area is too dry for small farms. Today it consists largely of ranches, timber reserves and irrigated factory farms dependent on government-subsidized water. This is a colorful, action-packed frontier history in which, many will feel, the bad guys won.