The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

Peter Cozzens, “The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West,” Alfred A. Knopp, 2016, 467 pgs.

The only book I have read, or even know of, that also comprehensively covers the history of the American Indians is Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” written in 1970.  That book seemed to have an agenda: Portray the U.S. government as genocidal.  Now there is this present book by Cozzens which presents a more balanced historical account of the period, chronologically detailed from the Army point of view but giving equal voice to Indians.  The government’s response to what was commonly called the “Indian problem” was, in fact, inconsistent, and although massacres occurred and treaties were broken, the federal government never contemplated genocide, even though the results ended up much the same.  That the Indian way of life must be eradicated and replaced with farming, if the Indian were to survive, was taken for granted by all sides of the white society. 

Before getting into the book, I have a few observations and conclusions of my own which are not in the book but, at least to me, result from my reading.  First, the best way to grasp the Indian macho culture is too think of them much the same as modern gangs.  Their macho culture demanded warfare for young men to prove their manhood.  They were a tribal culture with a twist: strongly individualistic behavior made coordinated and timely military maneuvers almost impossible.  Their cooperation and coordination exhibited at Custer’s Last Stand was an anomaly, seldom repeated.  In fact, the main strength of the army in fighting the Indians was the Indian participation as scouts and fighters.  Also, and this is in the book, the warfare on the Great Plains is best described as emigrants displacing emigrants.  Indians forced west trampled the Indians already there; then White emigrants trampled the recently arrived Indians and sent them onto Reservations or into graves.

The author explaining how Plains Indians saw warring as a “cultural imperative,” a way to prove manhood, offers a graphic description of the art of scalping. “Indian men wore their hair long, which made taking the scalp of an enemy warrior relatively swift and simple,” he writes. “Grasping a tuft or braid in one hand, with the other a warrior made a two- or three-inch-wide cut around the base of the skull, usually with a butcher knife. A quick jerk tore away the skin and hair with a ‘report like a popgun.’ ” According to Cozzens, many Native American warriors mutilated corpses because disfigurement was thought to safeguard the killer from the dead person’s revengeful spirit in the afterworld.

My Notes:

Pg. 7:  No epoch in American history is more deeply steeped in myth than the era of the Indian Wars of the American West.  For 125 years, much of both popular and academic history, film, and fiction has depicted the period as an absolute struggle between good and evil, reversing the roles of heroes and villains as necessary to accommodate a changing national conscience.

In the first eighty years following the tragedy at Wounded Knee (Dec 29, 1890), which marked the end of Indian resistance, the nation romanticized Indian fighters and white settlers and vilified or trivialized the Indians who resisted them.  The army appeared as the shining knights of an enlightened government dedicated to conquering the wilderness and to civilizing the West.  Then this all reversed with the publication of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” and, later that same year (1970) the film Little Big Man.

Pg. 25:  Despite the seemingly endless need for more troops to defeat the Confederacy during the Civil War, the Lincoln administration encouraged people to hit the trails west.  In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act.  Beginning January 1, 1863, any U.S. citizen or intended citizen would receive title to 160 acres of federal land west of the Mississippi River, provided the claimant had improved the property, had resided on it for five consecutive years, and had never taken up arms against the U.S.  This intensified the pressure on Indian lands.

Pg. 121:  In 1871 the treaty system ended, buried in a single statement in an obscure clause of the Indian appropriation act: “Hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the US shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the US may contract a treaty.”  Indians were now legal wards of the government.

Pg. 247:  Custer’s Last Stand (1876).  The Indian village he came upon had 960 lodges.  “Seven thousand Indians camped together, of whom eighteen hundred were warriors.  The pony herd probably exceeded twenty-five thousand.  It was the largest Indian gathering on the northern plains since the 1851 Fort Laramie council.  Custer divided his regiment into four parts.  He assigned a three-company battalion to Major Reno (175 men) and another three companies to Captain Benteen (115 men) along with another 136 men protecting the pack train.  Custer retained 221 men.  On this day the Seventh Cavalry lost 258 killed and 60 wounded while the Indians had thirty-one warriors, 6 women, and 4 children killed and less than 100 wounded.