The Earth Is Weeping
The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
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4.6 • 39 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Bringing together Custer, Sherman, Grant, and other fascinating military and political figures, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo, this “sweeping work of narrative history” (San Francisco Chronicle) is the fullest account to date of how the West was won—and lost.
After the Civil War the Indian Wars would last more than three decades, permanently altering the physical and political landscape of America. Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the intertribal strife over whether to fight or make peace; explores the dreary, squalid lives of frontier soldiers and the imperatives of the Indian warrior culture; and describes the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies. In dramatically relating bloody and tragic events as varied as Wounded Knee, the Nez Perce War, the Sierra Madre campaign, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, we encounter a pageant of fascinating characters, including Custer, Sherman, Grant, and a host of officers, soldiers, and Indian agents, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud and the warriors they led.
The Earth Is Weeping is a sweeping, definitive history of the battles and negotiations that destroyed the Indian way of life even as they paved the way for the emergence of the United States we know today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sweeping narrative, Cozzens (Shenandoah 1862), an expert on 19th-century warfare, confronts Dee Brown's classic text, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Cozzens finds it too reductive in its treatment of the various Native American tribes involved in the bloody contests over land that raged from the 1860s until 1890. He persuasively argues that those who allied with the U.S. government and took up arms against other tribes can't be dismissed as simply greedy, and he zeroes in on issues that motivated each tribe to choose sides. After opening on the plains of Wyoming with Red Cloud's War of the 1860s, the first half of the book builds to the crescendo of Custer's "last stand" at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Cozzens tucks into this section an insightful chapter on how Native Americans and the U.S. Army both trained men to fight. The second half ranges from the betrayal of the Nez Perce in the Northwest to the bitter conflicts in Apacheria in the Southwest, concluding with the 1890 slaughter at Wounded Knee. Cozzens excels in describing battles and the people who orchestrated and participated in them, expertly weaving in the relevant politics and never shying away from the role racism played in this destructive warfare. Maps & illus.
